20 by 20

A personal list of hip-hop's best

by Franklin Soults

This list of 20 favorite rap albums released over the past 20 years gives props to many standard texts and several that have been all but forgotten. Self-appointed guardians of the truth will surely

take exception to a few and bemoan the exclusion of certain "greats" -- Boogie Down Productions' Criminal Minded, A Tribe Called Quest's Low End Theory, Dr. Dre's The Chronic, Lauryn Hill's The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, and on and on till the break-a-dawn. I'd just remind them that the hip-hop canon is living history that's still under construction, and that this version -- my version -- of the canon doesn't codify that history so much as stake a claim for some artists' place in it.

Within the confines of the format I've chosen -- I've stuck to album-length CDs (all but one in print), included each artist only once, and excluded all non-rap hip-hop derivatives no matter how enthralling (Tricky, DJ Shadow, Prince Paul's Psychoanalysis (What Is It?)) -- these discs still trace my biography as a committed fan with an outsider's perspective, one who has been less interested in truth telling (or "keepin' it real") than boundary busting ever since I started buying 12-inch rap singles back in 1983. So the oldest album on this list is Run-D.M.C.'s 1986 masterpiece Raising Hell, the first to cross over to a huge, album-buying, white audience; and the list's biggest cluster comes just two years later, when the possibilities of that breakthrough were busting out in all directions, before black nationalists, ghetto-centric gangstas, and Afro-centric preachers gained the upper hand and took turns turning the music inward, for better and for worse.

1) Public Enemy, It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back (Def Jam, 1988). As brazenly raw, outrageous, and explosive as The Clash, yet achieving something no punk had ever managed in this country: true avant-garde populism. Hip-hop may have left behind the audacity of Chuck D's explicit racial politicking, but the Bomb Squad's brutally dense, gloriously funky beats raised the implicit aesthetic stakes forever, for everyone.

2) The Fugees, The Score (Ruffhouse, 1996). Where PE exploded on the scene like a perpetually detonating bomb, the Fugees grew and blossomed like some kind of miraculous tree of knowledge. Here they humanize even their most radio-ready cuts with loose soul, improvised jokes, gritty street truths, and dogma-dissing common sense -- cascading moments that seal their second disc as the most touching rap album of all time.

3) L.L. Cool J, Mama Said Knock You Out (Def Jam, 1990). Think of L.L. as hip-hop's Elvis, a personality so astoundingly charismatic he could transmute the subculture he perfectly embodied into genuine pop art for the masses. Like Elvis, he was eventually smothered by that achievement, but he was also able to return miraculously to life when he perceived his career was truly at stake.

4) The Beastie Boys, Paul's Boutique (Capitol, 1989). Time and place make this pastiche their best. It's a Joycean transformation of knowledge into form, E-Z Reader style -- or it's an Abbey Road (which it samples) that celebrates NYC as the capital of modern, polyphonous pop culture, where the Funky Four Plus One rap with Jack Kerouac.

5) De La Soul, Buhloone Mind State (Tommy Boy, 1993). Caught between "sell-out pop" and a rap mainstream taken over by "thugs dealing drugs," the Daisy Age founders hunker down with producer Prince Paul for the third and last time to expose their soul. Never before or since have they flowed so smoothly, and no one has ever probed the meaning of hip-hop's outskirts so relentlessly.

6) The Jungle Brothers, Done by the Forces of Nature (Warner Bros., 1989). Other Native Tongues crews scored bigger hits, and the JBs' own 1988 debut hit the pleasure centers more instantly. But this follow-up creates an urban jungle where the Daisy Age could bloom to its fullest, with camaraderie, sexiness, and joke after joke after funky scratch.

7) Hip Hop Greats: Classic Raps, (Rhino, 1990). This doesn't hold together the way some old vinyl collections (Sugarhill Greatest Rap Hits Vol. 2, y'all) do, but that's partly because the first five years of recorded rap didn't hold together, either: the form burst its own seams between "The Breaks" and "White Lines," busting out of inner-city boomboxes and into suburban dance caverns. After that, it was just about bringing it all back home.

8) Outkast, Aquemeni (La Face, 1988). Gangsta rap left such an indelible mark on hip-hop, it's no surprise these ex-hustlers stay strapped even as they invite you down to the Bar-B. In their case, though, the hard edge actually makes their rich, complex, tuneful portrait of Southern inner-city life more convincing.

9) Run-D.M.C., Raising Hell (Profile, 1986). A brazen fashion show of stripped-down, puffed-up, black male urban style. It's all about toned muscle and perfect rhythm, each successive cut kicking the excitement to a new level, with the rhymes just clever color commentary from the runway models themselves. Simple, but enough to change the world.

10) Ghostface Killah, Ironman (Razor Sharp/Epic Street, 1996). The most clearly lit portal into the Wu-Tang Clan's occult underworld is the new godsend The RZA Hits, which collects some of the most straightforward tracks from the members' most important albums. It logically culminates with Ghostface Killah's "All That I Got Is You," which confirms my impression that his solo project is the most crisply rendered and affecting of all those celebrated anti-masterpieces.

11) The Goats, Tricks of the Shade (Ruffhouse, Columbia, 1992, out of print). "I'm not your typical American!" boasts a leftist, interracial Philly crew of rappers and musicians who, as you might guess, also aren't your typical hip-hop heads. But the way they open up PE's lyrics of fury and tighten the Native Tongues' hippety-skippety soul is "Where It's At" in a way Beck could never be: boomin' with the bass, and down with the downtrodden.

12) Cypress Hill (Ruff-house/Columbia, 1991). Only a handful of '90s records could induce humanists like me to cross gangsta's line of blood. "How I Could Kill a Man" and its accompanying album were the first. The resentment in B. Real's crafty lyrics and snide vocals engage the mind, the buzz of DJ Muggs's whining sound effects and warped beats seduces the ear, and the haze of slow-swirling hemp smoke blunts the reality of everything.

13) The Real Roxanne (Select, 1988). Sharp-tongued, sweet-voiced, and a looker to boot, this Puerto Rican speed-raps and slow-croons with the sassy enthusiasm of a minor-leaguer batting .500 and waiting for that call from the majors. Of course, it's her amateurism that makes her such a winning example of hip-hop's innocent pop ambitions back when conquering New York meant conquering the world.

14) Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott, Supa Dupa Fly (The Gold Mind/EastWest, 1997). Timbaland's spacy but sharp-edged backing tracks and Missy's almost sultry street persona -- hard mostly by implication -- would have been news enough, but there's also her incredible ability to slip between song and rap as if she were just changing dance steps. It signaled the arrival of a talent as multifaceted (if not as elevated) as Lauryn Hill -- and twice the fun.

15) Eric B. & Rakim: Follow the Leader (Uni, 1988). Paid in Full set the stage and raised the ante for all hip-hop, with Rakim's stunning rhymes and perfect cadences, but this is where Eric B. earns his top billing -- here with ferocious beats, there with super-chilled funk, everywhere with spare, mysterious samples.

16) The Notorious B.I.G., Life After Death (Bad Boy, 1997). Biggie was so thoroughly street, many outside observers never noticed the genius of his unostentatious, thick-tongued raps, hidden as they were behind Puffy Combs's bright, R&B-flavored production. At times the contrast still feels like a contradiction, but this uneven tour de force also features some of the most resounding rap hits of the decade.

17) EPMD, Strictly Business (Fresh, 1988). Some complain that this duo are just mush-mouthed automatons vacantly rapping behind assembly-line slow funk. Well, so what? As their debut makes plain, the whole point is "You Gots To Chill." From here, they tightened the formula, but this catches them when their blubbery tone sounded like democracy in action, their dopest samples were still fresh, and their gats were only metaphorical excess.

18) Eminem, The Slim Shady LP (After-math/Interscope, 1999). Only by playing the recognizable character of a deprived, depraved Caucasian hanging at the margins of the black underclass did Eminem get props as the first "legitimate" white rapper. Still, he wouldn't have earned it without his mad skills. Forget "flow"-- his tone just drops an endless series of outrageous, brilliantly rhymed one-liners. Like so much great transgressive art, this comedy doesn't just risk being misunderstood, it demands it.

19) 2Pac, Me Against the World (Interscope 1995). This desperately constricted icon of bad karma always milked his allure of doom, but whereas the pathology is usually despicable, it's a disservice to Tupac Shakur's gangbanging fans to dismiss how accurately he represented their fucked-up straits. A long year before his murder, this melancholy, fucked-up document already made me want to add my wreath to his perpetual public mourning ritual.

20) P.M. Dawn: The Bliss Album . . . ? (Gee Street, 1993). Prince Be doesn't have a very commanding rap style or rhyme sense; he's just a consummate sampler and solid composer visionary enough to construct an alternate Paisley Park, one in which rap, pop, and R&B are equally valid shades in the sound of blackness. After this quiet storm, he never again tried to ally himself with the hip-hop nation. But the dream lives on.