The finished version of "Takeover" ended up on The Blueprintand the studio version proved it albu, be not just a brutal diss track but also a genuinely great song, and one of many on The Blueprint. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Phonte and Pooh hold their own, and every song has its own dimension, making it another classic debut in the decade. And this one is all about the instrumentals. It's an indestructible document of human emotion gone wild. Retrieved August 6, Ever since Rhymesayers Entertainment was founded in as an independent record label they have been consistently dropping high-quality Hip Hop from 2000e wide roster of talent.

Today, I gave myself the task of listing the 30 best albums from the decade. Now, when we talk about the 30 best, this only means quality and importance.

Possibly the greatest album of them all during this decade, Jay released The Blueprint , an album that was truly one of the better releases in his catalog. From the focused laser sharp lyricism to the lush soulful production of Just Blaze and Kanye West, this album was full of greatness.

The comeback album from Nas is a classic in many eyes, and how could you dispute it? An album that sometimes goes unnoticed or slept on by many in the genre, this album is truly the greatest thing that Pusha and Malice created. They would receive the most lush instrumentals from the Neptunes, which worked wonders for them on the album. Believed by many to be the best Ghostface album, this project features some of the best music to ever come from the Wu Tang camp and Ghost does what he does best as always.

Full of eccentric rhymes, street tales, and amazing production, this album is Ghost at his absolute best and without a doubt, a Hip Hop classic. While his previous albums had everything you wanted out of the Broad Street Bully, the music here and the focus he brought with it is amazing. Depending on who you ask, this Outkast album is either a classic or a bit too left. Though I prefer ATLiens and Aquemini over this album for obvious reasons, this is the album where we saw Outkast stretch their eccentric nature and creativity beyond the norm.

After a failed experimental album with Electric Circus, Common bounced back with an amazing sound courtesy of Kanye West and longtime collaborator J.

The production was mostly soulful and straightforward, with Common spitting his best verses since his Resurrection days.

This is the greatest Kanye West album. Kanye blends the perfect amount of solid lyricism, good subject matter, emotional dimensions, and out of this world production together to make his magnum opus and one of my favorite albums of the decade. Another underrated classic in Hip Hop, LB came with something that ranks no. Phonte and Pooh handle the lyrical end as expected, while 9th Wonder controls the production, and unsurprisingly, the result is an album that holds up even now, some 12 years later.

With aggressive lyrics, booming production that ranged from murderous to upbeat to soulful to despondent at times, Game gives us an album that is beyond what any of us expected. This album from The Roots is one of their best and their best release of the s. Quality over sales. During the late 90s and s, no one was really on fire quite like Jay. When speaking of some of the greatest debuts in Hip Hop, I think this album belongs in the top His debut is possibly the best of his career, and it is one of the best of the decade without question.

The album that really set the tone for Wayne to be the biggest star in Hip Hop for a time is also his arguable best album I prefer the first Carter album slightly. If we are talking lyrical comfort, production, and creativity, this album is where Wayne stepped out of his comfort zone and showed he could make a straight up Hip Hop album devoid of the old Cash Money sound.

This album is one of my favorites of the decade personally. More so a collection of songs than an official album, this flawless project from Nas is too great to NOT include on this list. The Neo-Soul movement impacted Hip Hop very much and I think this Common album is the personification of that in a way.

While this is the highest selling album of the s in Hip Hop, I think it is the 2nd best Eminem album. Mainstream acclaim aside, this album was really a solid listen that showcased Em having more fun musically while still providing the psycho white boy image that won fans over on his Slim Shady LP album. The glossier production sounded distinctly like what we now think of as "s" compared to the very '90s-sounding Hard Core , and Kim was an even tougher, more compelling rapper on this album than on its predecessor.

And while it lacked a Top 40 hit, The Notorious K. When Kim raps "I guess you know by now who's number one," she practically dares you to suggest it could be anyone else. OutKast did it all.

The production -- which combined sampling with live instrumentation and pulled from psychedelia, soul, funk, and more -- was as musically ambitious as the classic '60s and '70s records that OutKast and other rappers were using as source material, yet OutKast and frequent collaborators Organized Noize still made it sound like ahead-of-its-time rap music.

And the rapping itself was just as out of this world as the music. Andre was still three years away from "Hey Ya! As always, Andre's out-in-space style is grounded by Big Boi's more down-to-earth style and bulletproof punchlines, and standout verses by Killer Mike and Gangsta Boo add grit to OutKast's increasingly melodic sound too. These days, it's easy to take for granted how fantastic OutKast were in their prime, and forget how they had to release masterpiece after masterpiece just to get accepted by the East and West Coast scenes that thought the South was a joke.

But whenever you take the time to really dive back into Stankonia , OutKast sound even better than you remember. The hits "Ms. Jackson," "B. It's truly timeless. OutKast were well-established by , but that year also saw the emergence of another soon-to-be Atlanta rap star, Ludacris.

Following Luda's independently-released debut Incognegro , he inked a major label deal with Def Jam South the now-defunct Southern branch of Def Jam , re-recorded a lot of Incongegro 's songs, added a few very key new ones, and came out with the instant-classic Back for the First Time.

OutKast collaborators Organized Noize did produce one track on this album "Game Got Switched" , but Luda represented a different side of the South than OutKast, and the album's most groundbreaking production came from two rising Virginia artists who hadn't contributed to Incongegro : The Neptunes "Southern Hospitality" and Timbaland "Phat Rabbit".

Coming from Virginia, where they were pretty much equidistant from the New York rap scene and the Southern rap scene, The Neptunes and Timbaland absorbed all different kinds of regional sounds and came out with a maximalist, futuristic, genre-defying production style that would define the early s, not just within hip hop but within pop and rock and beyond.

Still today, one of the greatest Neptunes beats of all time is "Southern Hospitality," and it was also one of the earliest examples of Luda figuring out how to add real hooks into his music.

Later albums would find him getting more and more pop-friendly, but Back for the First Time is overall pretty raw. It's the Ludacris album of choice if you want him at his hardest and least frilly, and it remains a grand introduction to one of the most charismatic rappers of the early s. Eve came into the s swinging after her breakthrough debut album Let There Be Eve Ruff Ryders' First Lady and her standout verses on Ruff Ryders' first two Ryde or Die compilations, but it was 's Scorpion that established Eve as a superstar and one of the seminal rappers of her generation.

With a Dr. Dre beat and a Gwen Stefani hook on "Let Me Blow Ya Mind," Eve was able to leave her mark on the mainstream Gwen would return the favor three years later by having Eve guest on the Dre-produced "Rich Girl" , but don't let that song overshadow the rest of Scorpion. Eve loads the album with menacing bars, and the bold, dark production of most of the album only makes her sound more sinister. Dre shows up again on "That's What It Is," which goes as hard as any of the Dre-produced hits of the era.

A good 15 years at least before Run The Jewels, El-P was running underground rap as a member of Company Flow, a producer, a solo artist, and the co-owner of the Definitive Jux label. Not a million miles away from the Deltron album, El's production on The Cold Vein pulled from the boom bap and turntable scratches of the '90s, but in a way that was cinematic and psychedelic and sounded like it was from the future.

Vast Aire and Vordul Mega rise to the occasion with wordplay and tongue-twisters that are just as mind-bending as the production, and they always manage to talk about real shit, even when they sound surrealist on the surface.

Jay-Z made a name for himself rapping alongside Jaz-O and then Big Daddy Kane in the late '80s and early '90s, but took his time when it came to making his own album. And while he was watching and waiting, the young Queensbridge rapper Nas released his debut album Illmatic , an instant-classic that received a now-legendary score of five mics from The Source and changed rap forever.

Jay took obvious notes from Illmatic and sampled a line from it when he finally released his own debut album, 's Reasonable Doubt. Gone was the fast-rapping Jay-Z of the Jaz-O days and in his place was an artist with a smoother, grittier style who told real-life stories of life on the streets in Brooklyn over some of the finest production of the era courtesy of Ski, Clark Kent, Illmatic contributor DJ Premier, and others.

Jay-Z intended for Reasonable Doubt to be a classic, and it was, but it wasn't the instantly-game-changing album that Illmatic was and it couldn't compete with the flashy, pop-crossover "Jiggy Era" that Puff Daddy started to lead after Biggie's tragic death. So Jay-Z went in an increasingly pop direction, and by the time of his single "Hard Knock Life Ghetto Anthem ," he wasn't just competing with the "Jiggy Era," he was starting to take over. Going pop in the late '90s and early s also meant getting dissed by other rappers, among them Prodigy of Mobb Deep and Nas, whose feud with Jay-Z was about to boil over as Jay-Z geared up for his best album since Reasonable Doubt , The Blueprint.

Months before its release, Jay made Hot 97 Summer Jam history by debuting "Takeover," a diss track aimed at Prodigy and Nas, during his set, alongside a childhood photo of Prodigy in dance clothes on the big screen. The finished version of "Takeover" ended up on The Blueprint , and the studio version proved it to be not just a brutal diss track but also a genuinely great song, and one of many on The Blueprint.

Production came largely from Just Blaze and Kanye West plus Bink, Timbaland, Eminem, and others , and together they established a rich, soulful production style that would dominate rap for years. Unlike his previous guest-filled albums, Jay carried the album almost entirely by himself, and he never lost steam.

The only guest appearance came from Eminem on "Renegade," and look, Nas is right, Em out-rapped Jay on the track, but Jay still packed some of his finest rhyme schemes into that song. That's mostly a good thing, but like his former collaborator El-P whose Def Jux label he was signed to in the early s , Aesop Rock was always one of the genuinely good ones.

He's always sounded like he has a lot of respect for the hip hop traditions that his music is steeped in, and he's always been a great rapper and producer. He remains prolific and consistently good to this day, but he was nearly unstoppable in the early s, during which time he released a handful of now-classic records, including Labor Days.

In hindsight, Labor Days doesn't actually sound like the antithesis to albums like The Blueprint ; it feels like it's coming from a similar place as Jay-Z was. The production largely by Blockhead and Aesop himself sounds very much inspired by the hazy, head-nodding boom bap of '90s New York rap, and Aesop's word-scrambling delivery falls right into the pocket.

Jay-Z's claim that Nas had a "one hot album every 10 year average" wasn't entirely fair, but by the end of the '90s, it was hard to deny that Jay-Z was enjoying more critical and commercial success than ever and Nas' relevancy was fading. But when Jay-Z brought national attention to their feud on "Takeover," it lit a fire up under Nas' ass and resulted not just in the response track "Ether" but also in the best Nas album since Illmatic. Like "Takeover," "Ether" is brutal but also a great song though, as was too often the case in early s rap, it's riddled with homophobia.

It's the reason "ether" -- as in, to utterly destroy someone -- is now a verb, and it's also the reason that "stan" is a noun. It comes from Eminem's song, but Nas made it a noun. Stillmatic is more than "Ether" though, and Nas making such a great album really spoke more volumes against Jay-Z's claims than any line in "Ether. El-P is an artist who never stops inventing himself, and whose old stuff never sounds outdated no matter how many times he pushes his career forward.

These days, he's more famous than ever as one half of Run The Jewels, but he was running underground rap two decades ago and his music from that era sounds as forward-thinking today as it did then. After the breakup of his great '90s group Company Flow, El went solo with his debut album Fantastic Damage , a drastic artistic leap from Co Flow's already-classic Funcrusher Plus.

As both the rapper and the producer, El had full creative control over Fantastic Damage and was able to establish himself as a true visionary. More than just a collection of beats and rhymes, Fantastic Damage is full of musical ebbs and flows and really plays out like a much grander statement than any of its individual songs could on their own.

Lif, and more , and it's especially thrilling to listen back to El-P's raps on this album now that we're so used to hearing him with Run The Jewels. We've seen so many rappers make one or two classic albums and fall off, but it's less often that we see someone evolve over time like El-P. The place he's at now as an artist really makes you see his classic records in a different light. If we're picking one album per artist, a lot of people would go with 's near-perfect The Marshall Mathers LP for Eminem, but if pressed, I always go with The Eminem Show because it feels like the grand finale to the classic Eminem era.

An artist who almost always knew how to title an album, Marshall Mathers introduced the world to his massively offensive alter-ego Slim Shady on 's The Slim Shady LP , he introduced us to the man behind the madness on The Marshall Mathers LP , and he took a look at the impact Eminem the artist had on the world with The Eminem Show. He also admitted the show was over with 's Encore , and then made a series of failed comeback attempts with Relapse , Recovery , The Marshall Mathers LP 2 , and Revival , before finally abandoning this trend on the still-just-okay-sounding Kamikaze and Music to Be Murdered By.

Eminem catapulted to the forefront of rap because of white privilege but also became a scapegoat for everything white suburban conservatives hated about rap, and there's perhaps no better response to all of it than "White America," the first proper song on The Eminem Show. And then there's "Sing for the Moment. You might argue that song ruined white rap forever and also unfortunately convinced Eminem he needed more and more ballads on later albums , but it also spoke directly to and validated the feelings of a lot of kids who needed to hear it.

The Eminem Show also attacked George W. Bush "Square Dance" , took on personal issues like the toll fame takes on a person "Say Goodbye Hollywood" and fatherhood "Hailie's Song" , and also reminded the world Eminem was still better than most people at making straight-up rap songs "Business".

Dre, "Business" found Eminem packing so many career-best punchlines over a top-tier Dre beat, reminding us that -- when you put all the baggage associated with Eminem aside -- he was truly one of the greats at the pure art of rapping. As mentioned in the Ludacris blurb, The Neptunes Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo were crafting a new sound in the early s that changed rap and pop music overall forever, and though they produced songs for tons of artists, their closest relationship was with fellow Virginia Beach duo Clipse, aka brothers Pusha T and No Malice.

The Neptunes produced all the music on Lord Willin' , one of the truly original debut albums of the s. The Neptunes' bright, multi-layered, rhythmic production sounded like a futuristic beach dance party, but Push and Malice's raps were as cold and deadly as anything coming out of New York. As with El-P, there's a different appeal to early Clipse records today than there was at the time because of the revitalized career Pusha T has had ever since hooking up with Kanye West in the s which so far hit its highest peak with 's Daytona.

He's one of the best rappers in the world right now , which seems all the more impressive when you remember he was putting out classics two decades ago.

These days, he sounds right at home over Kanye beats or on psychedelic Griselda and Freddie Gibbs tracks , but when you wanna hear him over out-of-this-world Neptunes production, there's nothing like Clipse. The Neptunes' core, hometown collaborators were Clipse, and likeminded Virginia producer Timbaland's was Missy Elliott. They'd been making records together since Missy' debut album Supa Dupa Fly , and they proved to be a dynamic duo. It's hard to pick just one early s Missy Elliott album a lot of people would've understandably went with 's Miss E It's a little shorter and tighter than the ones that led up to it, and with less guests crowding the album, there's more time for Missy to shine on her own.

Missy was far and away one of the best rappers of the early s -- charismatic, innovative, and unmistakable, no one else scratches the itch if you're in the mood for Missy Elliott. She was also a great singer and songwriter, and production wiz Timbaland knew exactly how to craft the kinds of beats she needed for her songs to reach their fullest potential. The Roots came into the s riding high off the strength of 's Things Fall Apart -- widely and deservingly regarded as one of their best albums -- and they just kept pushing forward with their first new album of the new millennium, Phrenology.

With everything from a hardcore punk interlude "!!!!!!! Like Pusha T, Black Thought is a lifer who's now also a regular of the new wave of golden age-inspired rap , and he still manages to get even better.

Some of the albums on this list feel very much like a product of the early s, but not Phrenology. The Roots made great records in the '90s, the '00s, and the '10s, and they always feel like they're transported to our world from a time and place of their own.

Phrenology was a multi-genre, album-oriented masterwork, but Common's Electric Circus -- made in collaboration with The Roots' Questlove, future Roots member James Poyser, and other members of the Soulquarians collective, and released just a few weeks after Phrenology -- took that concept to another level.

Down to the album artwork, Electric Circus was modeled more after pop opuses like Sgt. Pepper's then after other rap albums, and it almost entirely eschewed standard hip hop production in favor of a lively, multi-layered mix Best Rap Album Of The 2000s Card of psychedelic rock, funk, and soul.

It's more that all these extremely talented individuals came together to create this vast piece of work that was unlike anything else coming out at the time, and unlike any Common album before or since. It's an anomaly, and you can still hear its impact echoing in some of the very best modern rap albums like My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and To Pimp A Butterfly , both of which marched through the doors that Electric Circus kicked open.

In the earlier days of hip hop -- way before the internet blurred the lines between "mixtape" and "album" -- a mixtape was usually something put together by a DJ like DJ Clue or Kid Capri, who would mix together a compilation of songs and often have exclusives of previously-unreleased verses or help popularize new rappers in the process.

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