The Best Southern Hip-Hop Albums of the 2000s

Bought the studio first — the Atlanta room they renamed Stankonia had belonged to Bobby Brown — and then filled it with everything Organized Noize taught them plus everything they were finished with. B.O.B. - Bombs Over Baghdad runs at drum-and-bass tempo with a gospel choir and a guitar solo piled on top, and nothing else on radio in 2000 came near it.

Pimp C came home from prison in December 2005, and the reunion double album that followed gave UGK their first number one on the Billboard 200. Int'l Players Anthem (I Choose You) is why: DJ Paul and Juicy J loop a Willie Hutch record and let Andre 3000 rap a whole verse before a drum ever lands. Spotify's edition adds three bonus tracks to the original twenty-six.

Over a million copies moved in its first week, a number nobody in 2008 expected a rapper to reach again, and the Grammy for Best Rap Album followed. A Milli is Bangladesh's beat and almost nothing else — a stuttered, pitched-up vocal sample, a sub-bass, no chords anywhere — with Wayne rapping through it for three and a half minutes and never bothering with a chorus.

Two solo records sold as one, and the Grammy voters handed it Album of the Year in 2004 anyway. Hey Ya! is the reason your parents own a copy: Andre plays the acoustic guitar himself, and the bar pattern keeps clipping a beat short, so the handclaps never land where a dancer expects. Big Boi's half is the better rap record and gets less credit.

Grand Hustle and Atlantic put it out in 2003, with DJ Toomp behind Be Easy and 24's and the word trap suddenly naming a genre rather than a place. Rubber Band Man rides a David Banner beat built on a snare roll borrowed from a marching band, and T.I. chants the hook instead of rapping it. Spotify's edition lists 24's as a vocals-only version.

Running Def Jam South as its president while making it, Scarface handed Guess Who's Back to a Kanye West who had yet to release a record of his own, then put Jay-Z and Beanie Sigel on it. On My Block is the one that lasts — a soft guitar figure, a sung hook, and a verse that walks the same street four times and notices something new each pass.

Years of label litigation with Jive kept it shelved, and The Neptunes produced every track on it once it finally arrived in 2006. Keys Open Doors is Pharrell and Chad at their most miserly — one dry synth stab, a rattle of hand percussion, barely any low end — while Pusha and Malice fill the empty space. Border case: Virginia Beach, which most listeners hear as Southern.

Def Jam issued it in July 2005 through the Corporate Thugz imprint, and Spotify now files the credit under the shortened name Jeezy rather than Young Jeezy. Soul Survivor is Akon's beat and Akon's hook, a thin keyboard arpeggio circling while Jeezy talks over the top in that gravel; the ad-libs carry more weight here than most rappers manage with full verses.

Memphis had been selling this out of car boots on cassette for most of the nineties before Loud Records put a national budget behind DJ Paul and Juicy J. Sippin On Some Syrup drags UGK and Project Pat over a beat moving at half the speed of anything else on 2000 radio, all thumbed bass and a keyboard sliding flat. Spotify asterisks several titles while marking every track explicit.

Disturbing tha Peace and Def Jam South put it out in late 2001, with Timbaland handling the lead single. Rollout (My Business) is a bass pulse and a hiccuping vocal tic that leaves acres of silence for Ludacris to fill, which he does by changing his voice roughly every four bars. The explicit edition runs eighteen tracks; the clean twin loses the skits.

Mannie Fresh walked out of Cash Money in 2005, leaving Wayne to make the sequel without the producer who had defined the label's sound for a decade. Hustler Musik is where the replacement voice arrives: a minor-key piano figure, drums that stay out of the way, and a half-mumbled register nobody had heard from him before. Twenty-two tracks, and the skits are the only fat.

Rap-A-Lot signed him with the Odd Squad years earlier, and Houston still treats him as the funniest sad man in rap. Doubie Ashtray — Spotify's own misspelling of Doobie Ashtray — spends four minutes mourning stolen weed over a slow guitar loop, with Devin singing his own hook badly and on purpose. The correctly dated 2002 upload sits beside a 2013 duplicate of the same record.

TVT put it out in October 2002, and Get Low climbed to number two on the Hot 100 the following year, which is how a regional Atlanta party record reached every wedding in America. The track is a squealing synth line, an 808 kick and Lil Jon shouting one syllable at a time, arranged closer to a marching chant than a rap song.

Jackson, Mississippi got its one national moment here, and Banner produced nearly all of it himself — the same year he gave T.I. the Rubber Band Man beat. Like A Pimp drops Lil Flip onto a chorus over churchy organ and a snare pattern that swings harder than crunk usually permitted. The second half is where Banner stops shouting and starts writing.

Every beat belongs to 9th Wonder, chopped soul built in FruityLoops rather than anything the South was selling in 2005, which is why the regional label sits awkwardly on them. Lovin' It rides a sped-up vocal loop and a snare with no reverb on it whatsoever. Border case: Durham, North Carolina, Southern by map and boom-bap by ear. Spotify's clean twin quietly drops a track.