Random A-List for Set: Hip Hop

Hip hop.

Here are 12 A-list albums, selected at random from Set: Hip Hop. Use your Reload button to get more.

Buck 65: Punk Rock B-Boy [2023, self-released]
The only rapper I can imagine dropping the lines "Tripping on the psilocybin/Listening to Phyllis Hyman," "Sycophants shit their pants better take Immodium," or "The dildo of consequence seldom arrives lubricated" is clearly excited about being back in the business. True--sweat like Aroldis Chapman though he may, he's not gonna serve up a home run every time, or so I reminded myself three-four plays into this one. But then a funny thing happened, and it was literally funny. By the time I got to six-seven I was liking it more all over again. A-

Dream Warriors: Anthology: A Decade of Hits 1988-1998 [1999, Priority]
Once these black Canadians put out a well-liked album that missed the tail end of Daisy Age. Then they vanished. Gang Starr and Digable Planets connections got their next CD a token U.S. release, but the one after was strictly commonwealth--as far as the south-of-the-border rap community was concerned, King Lu and Capital Q no longer existed. So maybe nobody told them that you claim street no matter how middle-class you are, that jazz samples were a doomed fad, that Digable Planets blinked out faster than the evening star. And maybe that was good. Probably it didn't feel like that to them; one of their best songs is called "I've Lost My Ignorance," and I'm sure the disillusion hurt. But though their inspiration wanes slightly, they never surrender their thoughtful intricacy or race-man lyricism. Certainly they belong in the same sentence as De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest. And "Test of Purity" is the best song about nasty sex a nasty music has ever produced--in part because it's so explicit, in part because it's so imaginative, in part because it's so kind. A-

Eminem: The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce) [2024, Aftermath/Interscope]
Is some new crime against humanity that's failed to penetrate my politically oversaturated attention supposed to justify the absurd 46 the Metacritic solons granted this album, which doesn't expand the 52-year-old grandpa-to-be's skill set only because there are so few places left for his clarity and momentum and rhyming to go? True, he obsesses on while hopefully circumnavigating the trans perplex clumsily but not anything like cruelly, though that he should feel the need does make one wonder whether Mr. "I suck my dick better than you do" has ever gotten his sex life together. Also true, his clean-edged boyish-to-adolescent flow has roughened and deepened with age. But the musicality of his sprechgesang remains unduplicated and undiminished, so that by now it's safe to assume it's inimitable, and if you were offended before, how about a little "Fuck blind people and deaf people suck/So do cripples dumb quadriplegic fucks"? But on the other hand, he establishes himself here as the only rapper ever to brag about his daughter's GPA—a 3.9 at Michigan State. You go girl. A

Eminem: The Slim Shady LP [1999, Aftermath/Interscope]
Anybody who believes kids are naive enough to take this record literally is right to fear them, because that's the kind of adult teenagers hate. Daring moralizers to go on the attack while explicitly--but not (fuck you, dickwad) unambiguously--declaring itself a satiric, cautionary fiction, this cause célèbre runs short of ideas only toward the end, when Dre's whiteboy turns provocation into the dull sensationalism fools think is his whole story. Over an hour his cadence gets wearing, too. But he flat-out loves to rhyme--"seizure"/"T-shirt," "eyeballs"/"Lysol"/"my fault," "BM"/"GM"/"be him"/"Tylenol PM"/"coliseum," "Mike D"/"might be"--and you have to love the way he slips in sotto voce asides from innocent bystanders. Sticking nine-inch nails through his eyelids, flattening a black bully with a four-inch broom, reminding his conscience/producer about Dee Barnes, watching helplessly as an abused Valley Girl OD's on his shrooms, cajoling his baby daughter Hailey into helping him get rid of her mom's body, he shows more comic genius than any pop musician since--Loudon Wainwright III? A-

EPMD: Strictly Business [1988, Fresh]
Out of nowhere to the top of the charts, these frosty freezers are one more proof of the supposedly subliterate-to-subcriminal rap audience's exacting prerogatives--what's snapped up as freshest often is. The beats are disco hooks sampled full effect, two or three to the track; the attack is traditionalist, formalist, minimalist. Rapping almost exclusively about rap, E Double EE and Pee MD don't emote or pander or yuk it up. In their one sex boast, the skeezer gets the last word. A-

Fugees: The Score [1996, Ruffhouse/Columbia]
They got black humanism, gender equality, and somebody to eclipse Duke Bootee in the Columbia alumni magazine. They sample "I Only Have Eyes for You" from before they were born, misprise "Killing Me Softly" like it was the Rosetta stone, emerge unscathed from the both-sides-of-gangsta trap, and aren't so nervous about being followed they won't leave landmarks on their soundscape. And astonishingly, they're not just selling to a core audience--this is one of the rare hip hop albums to debut high and rise from there. So you bet they're alternative--they'd better be in a subculture backed into defiant self-pity by rabid reactionaries, lying ex-liberals, and media moguls suddenly conscience-stricken over the nutritional content of what they always considered swill. Forget their debut, from before they discovered the gender-equality formula in which one girl learning equals two guys calling the shots. Forget the Roots, Aceyalone, Pharcyde. This isn't another terrible thing to waste. It's so beautiful and funny its courage could make you weep. A

Goodie Mob: World Party [1999, La Face]
Not to truck with the boogie bromide that spiritual uplift requires certified fun, but this album is anything but the pop retreat the conscious slot it as. Quiet as it's kept, message was always icing for these Dirty South pathfinders anyway, and this is the first time their music has ever achieved the infectious agape that's always been claimed for it. The mood recalls early go-go--a funk so all-embracing that anyone who listens should be caught up in its vital vibe. But after 20 years of hip-hop, the rhythmic reality is far trickier than Chuck Brown or Trouble Funk ever dreamed--as is Cee-Lo's high-pitched overdrive, which may yet be remembered as one of the great vocal signatures of millennial r&b. A-

Ice Cube: Greatest Hits [2001, Priority]
He's always been intelligent, and talented. What he hasn't always been is honest. So though I miss "Dead Homiez" and the late anomaly where he plays an ex-G in a wheelchair, and note that this garbage scow lists alarmingly when it takes on his 1998 and 2000 albums (both named War and Peace, after how hard it is to get through them), I'm grateful to be able to access so many of his best beats and rhymes without once hearing him incite a race riot or force a Catholic schoolgirl to lick his testicles. A-

Kris Kross: Totally Krossed Out [1992, Ruffhouse/Columbia]
One step up the evolutionary ladder from the cute boy on the steps who's rechristened Fabian or Vince Eager, these two Atlanta 13-year-olds are totally fabrikated. They contributed less to their beats, lyrics, and look than the New Kids. And not only is "Jump" one of those works of art that makes rock and roll worth living for, a trifle that sweeps all questions of import and integrity aside, but there's an album to go with it. Nineteen-year-old producer Jermaine Dupri writes for irrepressible 13-year-olds so set on enjoying the full privileges of adolescence that only a bad cop would enforce their curfew. Dupri exploits their preadolescent tempos and timbres to the max. And he shades their ebullient music with subtly disturbing samples only lil boys from the hood could be sad and savvy enough to call their own. A-

Lyrics Born: Same !@#$ Different Day [2005, Quannum Projects]
Unlike most remix albums, not a fanbase-only ripoff. None of the eight remakes is inferior to the Later That Day . . . version; Evidence and KRS-One's "Pack It Up" and a funked-up "Hello" constitute clear improvements, "Do That There" piles on ridiculous rhyme, and the standout "I Changed My Mind" was a 12-inch. Nor is that all--the five new titles include a Bay Area praisesong, a motormouth "capping" dis, and just one too many showcases for LB's quasi-operatic helpmate Joyo Velarde. In short, had Later That Day . . . come second, you might well prefer this reinterpretation. A-

Wu-Tang Clan: A Better Tomorrow [2014, Warner Bros.]
Less a tour de force than a show of force, this is the music that can happen when a master producer gets to deploy nine skilled veteran voices--although the departed ODB is sampled, and effectively too, it's Cappadonna who fills out the cipher. If you're counting, rough-smooth-soulful Method Man and rat-a-tat-tat Masta Killa step up twice as often as Ghostface and Raekwon. But everybody's in the house, everybody raps better than he rhymes, nobody rhymes badly, and RZA is the man. Verbally, in the year a white Staten Island cop martyred a black Staten Island loosies vendor and a white Staten Island cop-turned-felon represented Staten Island in Congress, the album's vision of African-American life is longer on community than getting yours, but it's hardly unmaterialistic--mature, not respectable, as why the fuck should it be? Musically, it's almost utopian. A-