The Best Hip-Hop Albums of the '90s

Five producers on a ten-track record — DJ Premier, Large Professor, Pete Rock, Q-Tip and L.E.S. — and not one of them wastes a bar. N.Y. State of Mind keeps a false start in the mix, Nas admitting he doesn't know how to begin, then walking straight into the densest writing anyone managed all decade over Premier's piano stab. Thirty-nine minutes, no filler.

RZA produced every track and negotiated a Loud Records deal that let each member sign solo wherever he liked, which is why the next five years belong to them. C.R.E.A.M. runs on a two-bar piano loop from The Charmels' As Long As I've Got You, dusty enough to sound recorded through a wall. Spotify's plain edition keeps the original twelve-track sequence.

Bad Boy's first album, with Sean Combs executive producing and Poke of Trackmasters building Juicy on Mtume's Juicy Fruit almost untouched. The verse is a rags-to-riches inventory delivered so evenly it sounds bored, which is the whole trick. Worth knowing before you press play: Spotify's 1994-dated edition runs the original seventeen tracks but carries The What as a radio edit.

Ron Carter, a bassist with Blue Note sessions behind him, was talked into playing upright on Verses from the Abstract, which tells you what Q-Tip was after. Buggin' Out is where Phife Dawg arrives properly, five foot nothing and furious, over a bassline mixed so far forward that everything else sounds optional. Bob Power engineered, and the low end really is the theory.

Havoc produced most of it himself, with Q-Tip brought in to co-produce and mix several tracks for a duo barely out of their teens. Shook Ones, Pt. II hangs on a shrill looped keyboard figure and a kick that lands a fraction late, and Prodigy delivers his opening threat like a man reading a weather report. Queensbridge never sounded colder.

Ghostface Killah is on so much of this that the sleeve bills him as co-star, and Nas turns up on Verbal Intercourse as the first rapper from outside the Clan to appear on a Wu-Tang album. RZA's beat there is barely a beat — a slow string figure, a kick, a great deal of empty space — and three writers fill it with coded crime narration.

Southern records belong on this list because the Southern list does not begin until 2000, and this is the best of them. Rosa Parks breaks in half two-thirds through for a stomp-and-clap harmonica breakdown with no relation to the song around it. Rosa Parks herself sued over the title; the case did not settle until 2005. Live bass, organic playing, zero G-funk.

Dialogue from the 1980 samurai cut-up Shogun Assassin runs between the tracks, which is why the whole record feels narrated by a child. 4th Chamber opens with Ghostface Killah shouting over a bent guitar figure before RZA drops the floor out, and GZA closes it in a monotone that never once rises. Coldest-sounding of the Wu solo albums, and the best written.

Roc-A-Fella existed because no major would sign him, so Damon Dash, Kareem Burke and Jay-Z built a label and had Priority distribute it. Dead Presidents II floats DJ Premier's loop of Lonnie Liston Smith's A Garden of Peace under a chopped Nas vocal, the rapping fast, clipped and uninterested in a hook. Spotify prints the artist name as JAŸ-Z, with a diaeresis.

A computerised tour guide introduces the tracks and reads out tempos in beats per minute, which was a peculiar thing to put on a rap record in 1993. Award Tour hands its hook to Trugoy the Dove of De La Soul over a Weldon Irvine keyboard lift, and Phife reels off cities like an itinerary. Warmer and poppier than its predecessor, on purpose.

Sixteen days after he was shot dead in Los Angeles, Bad Boy released his double album about surviving. Ten Crack Commandments is DJ Premier at his most severe: a numbered countdown lifted from Chuck D, a horn stab, nothing else, while Biggie recites rules in the flat voice of a man reading a manual. Spotify's twenty-four-track Explicit Version is the complete original.

Port Arthur, Texas, and the last time Jive left them alone — Pimp C produced most of it, played the keys and sang the hooks himself. One Day loops the Isley Brothers' Ain't I Been Good To You into something close to a funeral, with Bun B writing the tightest verse on the record. It went gold with no video and almost no radio.

Written for Troy Dixon — Trouble T Roy, a dancer with Heavy D & The Boyz who died in a fall in 1990 — and put out by Elektra as a single nobody expected to outlive them all. They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.) loops a Tom Scott saxophone phrase without ever resolving it, and the horns do the grieving that C.L. Smooth's verses keep at arm's length.

Every beat here is DJ Premier's, arriving in 1998 when most of their peers had moved on to shinier, more expensive production. You Know My Steez opens the record with a scratch hook assembled entirely out of other people's records, chopped tight enough to work as a melody. Guru's flat, unhurried delivery has no interest in being liked, and the album is better for it.

Houston's Rap-A-Lot label, with Mike Dean and N.O. Joe helping build something played rather than sampled: live bass, real keys, drums sitting low in the mix. I Seen a Man Die narrates a death from inside the dying man's head and refuses any moral at the end of it. Southern, and eligible here only because the Southern list starts in 2000.

Big Boi and André took the boards over themselves for much of this, credited as Earthtone III rather than handing everything to Organized Noize. Elevators (Me & You) drags at a tempo nobody else would risk — hollow drum machine, two-note bass — and André's closing verse answers the question of how they got rich by admitting they haven't. Border case on region, allowed here.

Chicago's strongest case for the decade, produced almost entirely by No I.D., who a few years later handed the same template to Kanye West. I Used To Love H.E.R. spends four verses on a metaphor about a woman who turns out to be hip-hop itself, over a soft loop that never changes. He was still billed as Common Sense in 1994.

Maceo Parker and Fred Wesley were hired to play horns on it, and Prince Paul produced with the group for the last full time. Ego Trippin' (Part Two) is three men refusing to be anybody's mascot, the drums loose and faintly drunk while Posdnuos picks apart the rappers who had started imitating them. It sold poorly and has aged better than almost everything around it.

Organized Noize produced all of it for LaFace, and the phrase Dirty South enters general use through a track of that name here. Cell Therapy moves on a nursery-rhyme keyboard figure and a bassline that sits under the beat rather than on it, leaving Cee-Lo's paranoia to do the rest. Atlanta's hardest record of the decade, and the least interested in charming you.

Rawkus put this out at the height of the major-label rap boom, and Hi-Tek produced most of it on a budget you can hear in the drums. Definition rebuilds Boogie Down Productions' The P Is Free into a warning about dead rappers, the pair trading half-lines fast enough that the seams vanish. They did not finish another album together until 2022.