The Best Hip-Hop Albums of the 2000s

Kanye West and Just Blaze got most of the board on a Roc-A-Fella record made in about two weeks, and Eminem is the only rapper who appears as a guest anywhere on it. Takeover rides a slowed Doors loop from Five to One while Jay dismantles two rivals in a single verse. Spotify credits the artist as JAŸ-Z.

Car crash in 2002 left his jaw wired shut, and he cut Through the Wire that way before Roc-A-Fella would let him rap at all. Jesus Walks marches on the ARC Choir behind a snare that sounds like boots on gravel, and the label spent two years insisting nobody wanted a rapper who sounded like this. Chicago, not the South.

Dr. Dre and the Bass Brothers split the boards on the record that took Best Rap Album at the 2001 Grammys. Stan loops Dido's Thank You under rain and a pen scratching, and the joke about fan mail stops being a joke by the third verse. Spotify's explicit edition runs nineteen tracks, keeping Kim and adding The Kids, the clean version's replacement for it.

Stones Throw put out twenty-two tracks in forty-six minutes with almost no hooks and no radio single, which is not how anyone was selling records in 2004. Accordion is built on a Daedelus loop that wheezes in and out while DOOM rhymes past the bar line as if the beat were optional. Region is arguable: Madlib works out of Oxnard, DOOM out of New York.

Jon Brion co-produced, which is why strings and a chamberlin turn up on a Roc-A-Fella rap record in 2005. Gold Digger speeds Ray Charles up past the point of politeness and hands the hook to Jamie Foxx, and it sat at number one for ten weeks. Twenty-one tracks here, including both versions of Diamonds From Sierra Leone.

RZA executive-produced, and the writing is the point: half-finished images, names that go nowhere, rhymes that land on sound before sense. Apollo Kids drops Raekwon in over a horn stab that never resolves, and Ghostface just talks louder over it. Spotify's edition runs seventeen tracks, three short of the 2000 CD — Woodrow the Base Head, the Iron's Theme intermission and the Clyde Smith skit are gone.

Out on his thirty-second birthday, three days before he died in February 2006, most of it was assembled in a hospital room from a small sampler and a crate of 45s. Workinonit chops its source so hard the loop keeps stopping mid-phrase, then restarting a beat early. Border case: an instrumental record on a rap list, and it earns the slot.

Sold as a retirement record, with one producer per track and not a single guest rapper across fourteen songs. 99 Problems is Rick Rubin returning to rap after years away, welding Billy Squier's The Big Beat to a guitar figure and letting the drums stand almost naked. The retirement lasted three years.

Answering Takeover took one song, and Ether was so effective the word entered the language as a verb. Nas builds it on a plain loop and a flat, unhurried delivery, refusing to raise his voice once. Spotify's fourteen-track edition drops Braveheart Party, which was pulled from later pressings and has never come back.

Eleven tracks in just over forty minutes, nine of them produced by Kanye West and the rest by J Dilla — a deliberately short record in a decade of bloated ones. The Corner puts The Last Poets on the outro and rides an upright bass line that never lets the song settle. Chicago again, and no relation to the neo-soul record its neighbour list claims.

Nine bullets in 2000 and a Columbia deal cancelled before Dr. Dre and Eminem signed him and produced most of this together. In Da Club counts itself in on a synth figure Mike Elizondo built, then sits on one of the stiffest, least funky drum patterns of the decade and wins anyway. Spotify's edition adds two bonus cuts to the original nineteen.

El-P produced every second of it for Definitive Jux, and it remains the clearest statement of what that label was for. Iron Galaxy opens on a rusted, detuned figure with Vast Aire and Vordul Mega trading lines about Harlem winters. Spotify's tags are a mess — Ox Out Of The cage, Raspberry fields and a lowercase vein all render wrong.

Written and largely produced by Eminem himself, which is the difference between this and the two Dre-heavy records around it. Sing for the Moment interpolates Aerosmith's Dream On and brings Joe Perry in to play the solo, an arena-rock move nobody else was making in 2002. It was the best-selling album of 2002 in the United States.

An anagram of the artist's name, put out by Rhymesayers in 2004 while he was releasing under three or four aliases at once. Rapp Snitch Knishes brings Mr. Fantastik in over a guitar loop that keeps flattening out, and the whole record buries its punchlines under cartoon dialogue. Spotify prints the title in full capitals as MM..FOOD.

Debuting at number one in January 2005, it had Dr. Dre executive-producing and 50 Cent on three of the singles, before the two of them fell out in public. Hate It Or Love It rides a Trammps sample that Cool & Dre chopped into something almost sweet, a strange bed for the verses on top. West Coast, which this list is allowed to take.

Loud Records signed a duo who spent the record arguing for food politics, self-defence and quitting your job, which is not what Loud was selling in 2000. Hip-Hop runs on a sub-bass line so heavy it later became the Chappelle's Show theme. Region is genuinely arguable — M-1 is from Brooklyn, stic.man from Tallahassee — and Spotify capitalises the name as Dead Prez.

Del the Funky Homosapien, Dan the Automator and Kid Koala built a science-fiction concept album set a thousand years out, and the same three fed straight into the first Gorillaz record a year later. Virus is Del writing malware to destroy every computer on earth, delivered deadpan over a string figure that keeps climbing. Spotify's edition tacks three remixes onto the original twenty-one.

Common narrates the whole thing in five acts, an odd structure for a debut on GOOD Music and Universal Motown. Day 'N' Nite (nightmare) — Spotify's rendering — is the Dot da Genius beat that started it, and it is the only track on the record without an explicit tag. Cleveland, and the first real bridge from rap into the sung, medicated pop of the 2010s.