50 Years of Hip Hop Album Review: Ready to Die, Me Against the World

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2023 was the 50th anniversary of hip hop, and in honor of this anniversary, in 2024 the idea bloomed in my 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. Due to some medical situations, I took a several months long hiatus from blogging that year, so I didn’t finish the series. It’s now 2026 and still proceeding fitfully, but I won’t stop if you don’t!

For its formative years, hip hop was a live entertainment form, with the first recorded singles not emerging until 1979, and the first albums in 1980. So my review covers 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 on our next installment!

The Notorious B.I.G., Ready to Die (1994)– Remember a few posts back when we had Doggystyle paired with Enter the Wu-Tang and it was like an apotheosis of West Coast and East Coast hip hop? Well this edition is a redux of that, only darker, marking where the musical rivalry turned deadly. Or at least it’s hard not to think of it that way. But, listening to this debut album from The Notorious B.I.G. now, I’m most struck by how masterful it is. Musically sophisticated, full of dynamic lyrical wit, equal parts ambition, raunch, fun, and deadly serious. And so damn catchy! Along the way, there’s an honest to goodness album structure that follows the stand-in character for the artist from birth to youthful hustle to success to depression and considering (maybe even committing?) suicide. It’s weird how perfectly together it feels when one learns that it was recorded partially under one label in 1993, shelved when producer Sean “Puffy” Combs was fired from that label, and then taken up anew a year later when Combs was starting Bad Boy records. And even more remarkable when you consider that Biggie was 22 when it came out and Puffy was 24, and they’d started doing work on it two years before that. Some of this no doubt comes from the general level of sophistication the milieu of East Coast hip hop had achieved at the time, and from hip hop’s own 15 years depth of recording history (which the both through samples and references the album makes frequent reference to). But surely the majority of the artistic ambition here comes from comes from Biggie himself. He said in interviews that the “ready to die” wasn’t about seeking death itself (though you have to wonder, with his subsequent end, and the album’s thematic struggle with depression), but rather about putting it all in to the music and going all out in pursuit of the vision. He does that here.

2Pac, Me Against the World (1995)- It seems relevant to mention here that Biggie and Tupac started out as friends. When they first met in 1993, they bonded on mutual creative respect, and visited each other (and even played together) on both coasts whenever one or the other was in town. That was what was going on before a falling out and the artistic rivalries of East and West Coast scenes, the business rivalry of Death Row and Bad Boy, and affiliated gang rivalries made it all take a turn. And this album, in fact, has a lot in common with Biggie’s- it’s informed by respect for hip hop’s history to that point, heavily autobiographical, and full of weighty struggles with issues of life, death, and creative aspiration struggling against the damage from a troubled life. 2Pac in fact intended the album to specifically tackle all of this, feeling in a way it was his last testament before an impending jail sentence. I would say for me personally that it doesn’t seem nearly as coherent as an album or as musically complex and compelling as Ready to Die. When it succeeds, it’s on the strength of 2Pac’s presence and a driving forcefulness more than mix or production. And, like the artist himself, it’s riven by genuinely visionary aspiration versus the violence of where it’s coming from. But the strongest tracks here are as strong as anything anyone in that era was putting out.

If you’re curious about the sources I used to compile my list, you can check them out here:

And if you want to catch up on the previous installments, here they are…

  1. Sugarhill Gang- Sugarhill Gang (1980)/Kurtis Blow- Kurtis Blow (1980)
  2. Sugarhill Gang- 8th Wonder (1981)/Grandmaster Flash- The Message (1982)
  3. Wild Style Original Soundtrack (1983)/Fat Boys- Fat Boys (1984)
  4. Kurtis Blow- Ego Trip (1984)/Run-D.M.C.- Run-D.M.C. (1984)
  5. Whodini- Escape (1985)/The Treacherous Three- The Treacherous Three (1985)
  6. Run-D.M.C.- King of Rock (1985)/LL Cool J- Radio (1985)
  7. Beastie Boys- Licensed to Ill (1986)/Run-D.M.C.- Raising Hell (1986)
  8. Boogie Down Productions- Criminal Minded (1987)/Eric B. & Rakim- Paid in Full (1987)
  9. LL Cool J- Bigger and Deffer (1987)/Big Daddy Kane- Long Live the Kane (1988)
  10. Boogie Down Productions- By All Means Necessary (1988)/EPMD- Strictly Business (1988)
  11. Eric B. & Rakim- Follow the Leader (1988)/Jungle Brothers- Straight Out the Jungle (1988)
  12. N.W.A- Straight Outta Compton (1988)/Public Enemy- It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back (1988)
  13. Slick Rick- The Great Adventures of Slick Rick (1988)/Ultramagnetic MCs- Critical Beatdown (1988)
  14. Beastie Boys- Paul’s Boutique (1989)/Big Daddy Kane- It’s a Big Daddy Thing (1989)
  15. De La Soul- 3 Feet High and Rising (1989)/EPMD- Unfinished Business (1989)
  16. Geto Boys- Grip It! On That Other Level (1989)/Kool G Rap & DJ Polo- Road To The Riches (1989)
  17. The D.O.C.- No One Can Do It Better (1989)/Ice Cube- AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted (1990)
  18. A Tribe Called Quest- The Low End Theory (1991)/Ice Cube- Death Certificate (1991)
  19. Dr. Dre- The Chronic (1992)/Pete Rock and CL Smooth- Mecca and the Soul Brother (1992)
  20. The Pharcyde- Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde (1992)/A Tribe Called Quest- Midnight Marauders (1993)
  21. Snoop Doggy Dogg- Doggystyle (1993)/Wu-Tang Clan- Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) (1993)
  22. Nas- Illmatic (1994)/Scarface- The Diary (1994)

Finally, if you’d like a playlist for the entire list, you can find that here. Listen to it sequentially for the historical development of the genre, or play on shuffle for maximum historical scramble!

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