A biography, a movie, videogames and clothing lines followed… then, bankruptcy. 11 million sales across the US and Europe, via sleekly efficient hip-hop anthems In Da Club, 21 Questions and P.I.M.P. Bottom line, his debut’s runaway victory could simply not be denied. Disjointed to some, but it’s hip-hop personified – and a glorious reminder of the only rules being no rules.įiddy’s tale is so clichéd it sounds made up, but that’s what made him such a success. Hey Ya! fuelled its massive crossover, but Big Boi’s Southern rap wins overall, even though there’s everything from G-funk to pop, electro to rock, soul to blues seeping across its eclectic grooves. One of hip-hop’s most audacious album releases, this is in essence two solo albums by Big Boi and Andre 3000. Speakerboxxx/ The Love Below – OutKast (2003) The skits may be tiresome after repeated listens, but they kinda have to be there: this was everyman hip-hop for a contradictory, confused and consumerist age. Back then, he was an irritating egomaniac who made great hip-hop, and blew up the business with this guest- and soul-sample packed treatise on how a “failure” wins. These days, Kanye West is an irritating egomaniac. “He’s the Marvin Gaye of rap,” enthused West. With The Corner featuring The Last Poets and They Say starring John Legend, it’s inclusive, warm and innovative, yet also cohesive in an all-too-rare example of how strong and varied a modern hip-hop LP can be. Its real victory is for Kanye again, as co-producer, but Common’s sixth album sees the Chicago native stepping up his rhyme game, too. Hip-hop here is merely the vehicle for a fast-travelling mind that avoids and outwardly challenges cliché – an aptly named, nourishing and intoxicating album. It’s wonderfully melodic, with strings and big keyboard sweeps flying over the beats, as 25-year-old Fiasco lays bare his “heart and soul”. Years in the making with Kanye, Jay-Z, The Neptunes and Pharrell Williams all involved, Food And Liquor nevertheless arrived like a breath of fresh air. Young but wise beyond his years on the likes of The Art Of Peer Pressure, this LP set Kendrick Lamar on a stratospheric rise. Good Kid, m.A.A.d city – Kendrick Lamar (2012)Ĭlassics are hard to call straight away – some are saying that Lamar’s fourth LP Damn (2017) is already that, but it was this conflicted tale about his Compton upbringing that made Lamar “the James Joyce of hip-hop” (!) according to Georgia Regents University professor Adam Diehl. And spread across as many years as is realistic, in reverse chronology. But we’re egalitarian – only one album per artist.
#Kendrick lamar good kid maad city discogs full#
Here, we’re concerned with the full works. No matter, there are some great old-school compilations. It’s Yours (1984) by T La Rock was a game-changer, but any long-term album success for T was elusive. Hip-hop isn’t always best suited to albums – in no small part due to dance’s culture of extended floor-fillers, varying mixes, novelty tracks, or simple one-off masterstrokes. Deep funk, disco, jams and politics… love songs, violence, dadaism and party tricks. We appreciate the UK’s produced its own share of wildly inventive rap artists – from Massive Attack to Tricky, via The Streets and Roots Manuva to Plan B and Dizzee Rascal, even the current grime scene stars such as Skepta – but they don’t sit easily inside ‘just’ a hip-hop capsule.Įven if you redux hip-hop to ‘two turntables and a microphone’ – no longer the case, anyway – you’ll find more variety than you could fathom. In fact, we’ve gone all North American here. And, of course, rappin’ Ed Sheeran is dead to us. Drake is the world’s primo music star right now and he raps. 1 Billboard rap single with Ice Ice Baby, but is that essential hip-hop? You be trippin’! (Ice’s story is actually pretty complex, but… sorry, time’s up!). Rap is now everywhere, but hip-hop is not. No raps? There are still hip-hop instrumentals – arguably the bedrock of much of today’s cut-and-paste pop. Rap is the rapping, hip-hop the wider culture of rappers, DJs, graffiti, breakdancing et al, as decreed by another NYC legend, Fab 5 Freddy. The rest is… here.Įven in broad-brush terms, ‘rap’ and ‘hip-hop’ aren’t interchangeable. Man-mountain Clive ‘Hercules’ Campbell, aka Kool Herc, was a Jamaican DJ already armed with a two-turntable setup, and he started mixing tracks and scratching live for the first time (publicly, at least), while his friend ‘Coke La Rock’ (no one remembers him!) rapped over the beats. And that, says legend, is when hip-hop was born. I n August 1973, at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the west Bronx, there was a party: 25c for ‘ladies’ and 50c for ‘fellas’. Michael Leonard digs through 40-plus years of LPs from wildly differing styles of urban music born of vinyl itself… From block-party origins to multi-millionaire empires, no music quite represents the ‘American Dream’ (and nightmare) like hip-hop.
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