While still plugging along on rounding up the 23 best albums of 2023, I’m beginning a new review this year. Last year was the 50th anniversary of hip hop! The legend goes that on August 11, 1973 DJ Kool Herc was DJing a party for his sister at a rented community room in an apartment block in the Bronx. He tried out a new style he’d been working on, where he would use multiple turntables to extend and mix the drum breaks of songs, with he and his fellow DJ Coke La Rock talking over the beats.

In honor of this anniversary, the idea bloomed in my mind that I should review the top 50 albums of that 50 years. As I crunched together a list from various sources, 50 proved to be too restrictive- many of the classics were getting squeezed out. So, to make a little more room, I opted for 100 albums, two for each of hip hop’s 50 years.

For its formative years, hip hop was a live entertainment form, with the first recorded songs not emerging until 1979, and the first albums in 1980. So my review will cover 1980-2023, with 50 posts of two albums each. The only ground rule I made for myself (besides looking for 2×50, aka 100, albums that were widely well-regarded) was that I had to have at least one from each year. As you’ll see by and by, some years get multiple albums, but since we have 100 spots for 43 years, it tends to all work out.

And with that, let’s embark!

The Sugarhill Gang, Sugarhill Gang (1980)– I’ll open by noting that this album didn’t make many “best” lists. But I’ve included it here for the simple reason that when it came out in February 1980 it was the first hip hop album ever. Sort of. The “sort of” being that while the Sugarhill Gang released one of the first commercial rap recordings with “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979 (and scored the first top 40 song for the genre), this album is only half hip-hop. Sugar Hill records founder and hip hop recording pioneer Sylvia Robinson wasn’t sure the market would support an entirely rap album, so three of the tracks are competent, albeit not historically significant, soul/disco outings. Still, this was hip-hop’s first foray, and the three tracks that are on the album- “Rapper’s Delight” with it’s classic “Good Times” sample from Chic (it even starts with the first recorded use of the name that the genre would bear: “Hip-hop, hippie to the hippie, to the hip-hip-hop and you don’t stop”), “Rapper’s Reprise” (which, mysteriously, is the first track despite the title), and the dynamic “Sugarhill Groove”- are delightful. While the group was assembled by Robinson for the express purpose of recording hip hop and founding her record label, there’s no denying the founding importance of Wonder Mike, Big Bank Hank, and Master Gee.

Kurtis Blow, Kurtis Blow (1980)- This album did make many lists. And is also not purely a hip hop album! There’s the yearning and simple soul song “All I Want in the World (Is to Find That Girl)”, and a somewhat out of place but rocking and fun cover of Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s “Taking Care of Business”. But the balance is shifted from Sugarhill Gang‘s 3:3 to 5:2, so hip hop is winning! This also represents the first major label recording for the genre, as it was released by Mercury Records. It wasn’t really a huge stretch for them, as they had a large soul, funk, and disco roster, but still worth noting. Kurtis Blow himself hailed from Harlem, and was only 20 when his breakout single “The Breaks” was released in 1980. That’s worth keeping in mind, because even at that young age he was influential- listening to the five hip hop tracks here, I was struck by just how sampled and lyric-checked they were by the Def Jam crew later in the 80s.