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Hip-hop is deep.

Or at least, it cuts deep.

But one of the truly remarkable things about hip-hop is that it evolves and expands faster than any other genre in music history.

Rolling Stone has put together a rather ambitious list of the most influential hip-hop albums of all time, with the top five including artists that have uplifted the hood and stayed in the home.

We had to keep our list short and sweet, because the magazine has gone and dug out a whopping 200 albums – the tip of the genre’s iceberg, in all honesty.

The result was a list that touches on every important moment in the genre’s evolution — from compilations that honor the music’s paleo old-school days, to its artistic flourishing in the late Eighties and early Nineties…

Let’s dive in:

1. The Notorious B.I.G., Ready to Die (1994)

Christopher Wallace was hustling and selling drugs to make ends meet before he became the Notorious B.I.G.

But the experiences poured into his hard-hitting, semi-autobiographical songs provided the drama necessary for such a high-stakes debut:

Ready to Die marked the precise moment when hip-hop’s golden age transitioned into its modern age, the height of New York hip-hop, and the sound of the greatest rapper of all time at the absolute top of his powers.

Listen to this album that “stared death in the eye and became larger than life” on Spotify.

2. Outkast, Stankonia (2000)

By the turn of the millennium, Outkast were the standard bearers for Southern hip-hop, a regional form unfairly derided as less sophisticated than rap’s coastal variants. Stankonia finds harmony in the region’s myriad forms — booty bass and HBCU marching bands, protean crunk and trap, psychedelic P-funk and organic neo-soul.

Listen to this album that addresses taboo subjects like sex, abortion, and hypocrisy on Spotify.

3. Jay-Z, The Blueprint (2001)

Although Reasonable Doubt was Jay-Z’s landmark debut, it was The Blueprint that helped him prove that he was a chart contender and a worthy heir to his late friend Biggie:

This is also the album where he aired out his grievances against Nas and Prodigy (the brash, Doors-sampling “Takeover”), but he gets that out of the way early, leaving the rest of the album clear for extra-clever boasts (“U Don’t Know,” “Izzo,” “Hola Hovito”) and some of the most emotionally direct writing of his career (“Song Cry,” “Heart of the City,” “Never Change”). Quick and witty, confident and smooth, he never sounded better.

Listen to this album on Spotify.

4. Public Enemy, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988)

Chuck D all but led the charge against things like the prison-industrial complex, the media, the surveillance state, and addictions to both drugs and TV.

Thus this album has been dubbed the “crowning achievement of rap’s greatest year” and “hip-hop’s first masterpiece”:

Musically, it was Sgt. Pepper’s; lyrically, it was London Calling, a radical mix of controlled chaos, righteous anger, dizzying scratch workouts, and samples that collided like a demolition derby.

Listen to this powerful album on Spotify.

5. Kendrick Lamar, To Pimp a Butterfly (2015)

Hip-hop lovers in South Africa might have a special connection with Kendrick Lamar, as his third album cruises through our streets, noting things like colourism, incarceration, and wealth inequality along the way:

Kendrick’s imagination here is deep and deft, as he dreams aloud of resilience, vengeance, and conversations with religious and rap deities. Both the sound and the words of Butterfly gracefully toe the line between diverse and disjunct with producers like Terrace Martin and Sounwave elevating Kendrick’s stories by bending jazz, soul, funk, and psychedelia into the shape of a hip-hop album.

Listen to this album “akin to a bestselling novel” on Spotify.

Shame, Seth is disappointed that Naughty By Nature didn’t feature so we’ll add ‘Hip Hop Hooray’ for him here:

Classic.

For Rolling Stone’s other top albums that defined hip-hop history, of which there are another 195 more, head here.

[source:rollingstone]