Tag Archives: Jay-Z

50 Years of Hip Hop Album Review: The Score, Reasonable Doubt

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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, whole new medical situation 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!

Fugees, The Score (1996)– First of all, I was shocked when I read up on this album to realize that the Fugees only made two albums. They’re definitely an example of a group whose quality and legacy of work exceeds its output! Listening to it, I appreciated how much is coming together here. There’s the sophistication East Cast hip hop production had reached at that time, the feeling for street-level reality of gangster rap, the social and political critique and vision of something better of conscious hip hop, the cinematic flair of the Wu-Tang clan, and the smooth groove of neo-soul. Which is not to say the Fugees, or this album, are in way following or derivative. Instead, they reached out and grasped multiple threads that were in the air, and tied them together in a free and flowing way while making central points of view that had often been overlooked- refugees, women. The album that resulted deserves every bit of the critical and popular acclaim it received at the time and retains to this day.

Jay-Z, Reasonable Doubt (1996)- I’m a big fan of Jay-Z’s later work, he is, in my opinion, a unique talent who created some of the best music of the 00s. So I was looking forward to listening to this, his first album, with curiosity. It feels a little rough to me, in the sense that it takes a few tracks to get going, and is loaded with guests who don’t always seem to support the artist and the album. But when it does hit, the swagger, the vulnerability, the musical and vocal flow, the wordplay all shows that his talent was there from the very first. And in fact, it’s a bit of a peculiar “first”, in the sense that he’d been part of the New York City hip hop scene for several years up to the point at which he decided that he wasn’t going to wait anymore to get signed and promoted, instead founding Roc-A-Fella records and recording and releasing his debut himself. It performed well but not amazingly, but it was his foot in the door, and here he is a whole billionaire music mogul later. I can’t quite get behind the many who consider it his best album (we’ll get there later in this list), but you can definitely feel the drive and hear the promise right from this start.

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)
  23. The Notorious B.I.G.- Ready to Die (1994)/2Pac- Me Against the World (1995)
  24. Bone Thugs-n-Narmony–E. Eternal 1999 (1995)/GZA-Liquid Swords (1995)
  25. Mobb Deep- The Infamous (1995)/Raekwon- Only Built 4 Cuban Linx (1995)
  26. 2Pac- All Eyez on Me (1996)/DJ Shadow- Endtroducing… (1996)

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!

What Were the Best Albums of the Twenty-Teens? V2! (Part 3 of 6)

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Wait, didn’t I already review the 2010s? Indeed I did! See here for my picks for the best albums of the 2010s from that first review. But we’re not quite done, and the reason why involves 2024…

It turns out that 2024 is the 25th year of the millennium. And that is just too rich a symbolic target for me to forgo- the chance to discover the 25 best albums of the past 25 years! I have all the source material I’ll need: I’ve reviewed the 2000s in several venues, did the above-mentioned 2010s review, and have top 20-23 lists for 2020, 2021, 2022 & 2023, with the search for 24 for 2024 now underway.

But my 2010s list is a little light comparatively. While my 2000s list from various sources sports around 60 entries, my 2010s review of 52 of the the critic’s top-ranked albums resulted in 34 picks. In order to balance that out a bit decade by decade, I’ve decided to go ahead and review the next tier down of 2010s albums per my original source lists. That will give us 36 more albums to review, which I’ll do in 6 blocks of 6. And hopefully thereby have a few more picks for our Grand Review of 2000-2024 to come!

Got it? Okay, let’s go with part 3!

Get Disowned (Hop Along, 2012)– There is plenty here that’s interesting, and maybe even prescient, in its emo confessionalism married with pop sensibility and harder rock edges. So maybe it’s not the fault of an album from 2012 that so much of the 2020s sounds like it. But it does mean that it reaches my ears sounding like a lot of other things. However much it might have stood out in the teens, I don’t think it’s going to be remembered long into the 20s compared to more recent exemplars of the same sound.

James Blake (James Blake, 2011)– I mean, really? It sounds, in the main, like a lot of autotune and low-key mumbling. I’ll grant that some interesting stuff is happening with the audio mix. But despite that, which even occasionally flashes into brilliance, it just doesn’t add up to a consistent album.

The ArchAndroid (Janelle Monae, 2010)– The ambition of this debut is present from its grand cinematic start. But then, because one cannot live by orchestra alone, we are immediately challenged to “Dance or Die” on the next track. And it just gets more varied, excellent, and delightful from there. This album, if somewhat sprawling, definitely shows the promise of what was to come from her, and shows that her talent was at full force right from the start.

Watch the Throne (Kanye West & Jay-Z, 2011)– I mean, they practically defined the hip hop of the 00s. And therein lays the problem with this album. I’m not comparing it just to other outings from the teens. I’m comparing it to The College Dropout. To The Blueprint. To Late Registration. To The Black Album. On its own merits, it’s pretty good, if a tad unfocused, but I don’t know if it’s best of decade good, and it’s certainly not best of career good for either one of them. Which, granted, is maybe an unfair standard. I do feel like both of them was individually on the track of a solid album here, but the pieces don’t quite fit together. But I will give it another listen!

The Epic (Kamasi Washington, 2015)– Okay, look. I’m not the guy who’s going to well review a three hour long jazz saxophone album. I can well believe it may have been an important and pivotal jazz album in the decade. Not my genre, not going to make it on my top list, but I did like it fairly well for the first hour.

Born to Die (Lana Del Rey, 2012)– From being enveloped by her warm voice in the first track, with the whole thing undermined by the stark lyrics and traces of sonic unease in the music mix, to the bouncy pop ode to a horrible partner in the second track, there’s no let-up here. Lana Del Rey delivers lush pop perfection, dark subversion and unease, and multilayered complexity in every song.

So there we are with batch three of six of the 36 overflow albums for the 2010s that I’ll be reviewing! From this batch, I would say the ArchAndroid and Born to Die are definite “yeses”, and Watch the Throne is a “maybe”. What awaits us in albums 19-24?