Justin says:. Jay-Z rivalry, so a few lines were devoted to that matter, notably the vicious "Ether. Ryu brings the boom-bap back — the album is a near-perfect modern interpretation of 90s 100 best rap albums youtube Hop, using the beat-structures of Hip Hop classics from Gangstarr and Big Daddy Kane on two of the stand-out tracks, sampling Public Enemy on another, and bringing back the Funky Drummer break too — especially people who know their classics will enjoy this album. March On Washington is 100 best rap albums youtube second album together, and it is another winner. Pimp C was such a genius, essentially the southern version of Dr. Brother Ali is one of the heavy-hitters of the fantastic Rhymesayers label.

Just about every project she's released has been even more breathtaking than the last, which makes Eve her clear winner for the decade. Her delivery and lyrical content are as showstopping as they were on previous albums like 's Laila's Wisdom , which appears slightly lower down on this list , but Ever has a clearer concept than any other Rapsody album.

Each song is named after a different iconic, powerful woman, and the theme of black, female excellence runs throughout the consistently strong album. Even when Rapsody isn't discussing powerful women directly, she's proving herself as one of modern hip hop's most powerful women as she cruises through her carefully penned lines and leaves the listener hanging on every word.

Kamaiyah arrived fully formed on her debut mixtape A Good Night in the Ghetto. She had recently dropped the instant-classic single "How Does It Feel," got a co-sign from YG who is one of two guests on this mixtape , and otherwise seemingly came out of nowhere with this song project, which remains some of the freshest G-Funk revival of the s.

Kamaiyah has a hell of an ear for beats, and she chose a whole bunch of them that are drenched in hazy nostalgia for the glory days of Dr. Dre and DJ Quik, but in a way that feels entirely in the now.

And Kamaiyah came prepared with enough hooks to sustain an entire career. Three years later, this tape still sounds like a summer BBQ even in the dead of winter.

No one really sounds like her, and no one shares the unique perspective she brings to the table with every song on this EP. Thank You 4 Your Service Epic, Jazz-rap legends A Tribe Called Quest hadn't released an album since the '90s, but they got back together to reclaim their throne and make one last album with Phife Dawg before he sadly passed away.

We Got It from Here Thank You 4 Your Service didn't sound all that different than Tribe's classics, but it still felt fresh upon arrival in , especially thanks to guest appearances by Kendrick Lamar and Anderson.

Paak, two clear descendants of the music Tribe helped pioneer and two of the leading artists of the current decade. Cole -- "gatekeepers of flow" on "Dis Generation. Even though the s saw the advent of rap groups forming over the internet by people who had never met each other in person, it still remains a genre where the regional aspect is important, and -- from Illmatic to good kid, m.

From the production to the words Wiki is rapping, everything about NMIM sounds and feels like being dropped right in the middle of a busy Manhattan street. It's one of the most vivid, imagery-inducing albums released by a New York rapper this decade, and it's a real treat that it came from Wiki, a talented young rapper who perfectly embodies the spirit and history of New York rap. Like the great New York rappers before him, he sees the value in honoring your forebears but being weird and unique and different at the same time.

When Big K. Wuz Here and the addictive bounce of its single "Country Shit," he seemed primed to be one of hip hop's next breakout stars. Unfortunately, once he signed to Def Jam, the quality of his music took a hit, and as trap became the dominant sound of the South, K. I had been rooting for K. Wuz Here but blew it out of the water. Part one was a perfected version of the sound he was shaping on K. Wuz Here , and part two saw K. Megan Thee Stallion's sleeper hit "Big Ole Freak" got her foot in the door, but her album Fever blew the house down.

It's only been about a year, but the time when Megan had just one signature song already feels like ancient history. She murdered just about every feature she did in , and she released a whole slew of future classics on her own album, Fever.

She's got the charisma, the bars, the hooks, and Fever so clearly defined the rap landscape. The only other rap newcomer on Megan's level is the very likeminded DaBaby, and he has the only other guest verse on Fever.

It's Megan and DaBaby in one place, doing what they do best, and it captures the essence of where rap is right now, just as the new decade approaches. He takes a beat, usually something with bare but forceful drums, a booming, rubbery bassline, and not much else, and he starts rapping before the song even fully kicks in. On paper, he's kinda like a punk band.

Baby On Baby hasn't even been out for a year, and it already feels like a greatest hits. It feels more like a quickly scrapped-together collection of songs than a Classic Album, but sometimes this much pure fun and sheer talent hitting you all at once is how classics are made. As Black Hippy's second stringer behind Kendrick Lamar, Schoolboy Q's immense potential was clear from the start, but he was always better at a few good singles or show-stealing guest appearances than at making the kind of fleshed-out, full-length albums that his most famous groupmate would make.

The closest he came, though, was 's Blank Face LP. Even the album's one pop-friendly song, the Kanye West-featuring "That Part," is more menacing than his usual standout singles. It's probably Q's last album you'd reach for if you wanted to dance, but it's his most focused, consistently rewarding work. Vince Staples is a little like Kurt Cobain, in that as soon as he made a near-perfect album that put him on the map as one of his generation's greats, he seemed to immediately regret it.

Vince has never tried to make an album as traditional as Summertime '06 again, and the most he distanced himself from it was on its followup, Big Fish Theory. Which, as far as the Nirvana comparison goes, would be his In Utero. On some songs, he doesn't even rap at all. Big Fish Theory is more of an art piece than a rap album -- and a very compelling art piece at that -- but it's also home to some of Vince's best rap songs.

If you would've been told at the beginning of that a Drake and Future album was coming, you might've thought it'd be a chance for Future boost his career by riding the wave of Drake's superstardom. What really happened, was Future -- who was at his creative peak at the time -- was the one doing most of the heavy lifting on this album and Drake was often trying to keep up with him. Drake's popularity has still not waned, but creativity-wise, he started to plateau after , and this album sort of represents the moment that mainstream rap trends started to shift away from Drake's lush pop rap and move more towards Future's gurgling, codeine-coated trap.

It's also the moment where Drake began to sound like a superstar coasting on auto-pilot, while Future still sounded as hungry as he did on DS2 , his magnum opus that had come out two months earlier. Over the course of her masterful third album GREY area , UK rapper Little Simz shows off a vast musical spectrum and a lyrical depth that leaves even many of the most popular rappers in the dust. Beginning with "Offence" and "Boss," the album starts out as raw and urgent as Civil Rights era psychedelic soul and as cutthroat as '90s New York rap.

From there, Simz explores glossy neo-soul "Selfish" , Eastern-tinged hip hop " FM" , introspective rap balladry "Sherbet Sunset" , and lush jazz rap the Michael Kiwanuka-featuring "Flowers" , all without losing her focus or mincing her words. She still hasn't caught on in the US as much as she has in her home country, but when I saw her playing a packed Music Hall of Williamsburg show in Brooklyn earlier this year, you could tell that everyone in the room knew they were witnessing something truly next level.

If there's any justice in the next decade, Simz will skyrocket to the top off the strength of her pure talent alone. Brockhampton took the hip hop world by storm in with their Saturation trilogy, a loud, rowdy, in-your-face series of records that probably needed a better editing job but it didn't matter. Like Odd Future who they were often compared to , they had that punk spirit that they might be here today, gone tomorrow, and you knew they'd leave a lasting impact even if they never made another record.

And as it turned out, their momentum was quickly damaged. They parted ways with a core member due to sexual misconduct allegations and ended up scrapping what would have been their next album.

Still, Brockhampton persevered, and the album they did make was massive leap from the Saturation trilogy. And Kanye didn't make an album like that until he was well-established as a superstar; Brockhampton did it as young kids who were barely had a reputation a year and a half earlier.

It remains as breathtaking as it was when Brockhampton first unveiled it to the world, and one of the decade's truly unique gems. Two of the biggest rappers in the world rapping about being millionaires on some Alien vs Predator -style crossover blockbuster rap album? It's relatable to pretty much no one except the two guys who made it, and it would've gone down in history as a flimsy, see-through cash grab Superstar collaborative rap albums continued to be a thing throughout the s, and they were almost always referred to by at least a handful of people as "the Watch the Throne of [whatever specific region or subgenre they were in].

Jay was not, but reuniting with the guy who produced some of The Blueprint 's best songs must have fired him up, 'cause he delivered on this album. The then-rising Frank Ocean, the not-yet-fully-out-of-the-woods Bon Iver, and the fresh-off-releasing- 4 Beyonce are here too, and Watch the Throne still feels as crucial for those artists as it does for Ye and Jay. Channel Orange contains an embarrassment of riches.

It's an album of characters and musical styles which almost seem built around their stories, but there's no detachment or distance in Frank's cinematic songwriting. It's a rich, enveloping listen; coming back to it years later, it's almost shocking how many great songs are here. It doesn't make sense that a song with such an obvious writerly conceit could be so nakedly vulnerable, but somehow, like a magic trick, it works.

The confluence of Frank's suddenly straining voice and the sheer sadness and clever poetry of the lyrics on the chorus never fails to make me well up. The lyric-writing here and elsewhere is remarkable for how closely it skirts up against good old-fashioned cliche, gaining power as it does so. It makes me think of Bruce Springsteen or Billy Joel in its unapologetic short-storyishness. Compared to the sparse, hushed, elliptical songwriting of Blonde , this is a full-throated opus, and one that continues to wow.

With his masterpiece Take Care and its similarly structured followup Nothing Was The Same , Drake made up for his limited rapping abilities with one of the strongest artistic visions that mainstream rap has seen this side of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. But on his "mixtape" If You're Reading This It's Too Late , he proved he could make a great album that got by almost entirely on just his rapping alone. The album didn't have the grand ebb and flow of its two direct predecessors, the beats were barer, but the songs remain some of the best in Drake's career.

The onslaught of the first five songs is perhaps the greatest opening to any Drake album, and his rapping on those songs is at its best. Before her self-titled album and Lemonade established her as an album-oriented artist of epic proportions, 4 was a more low-key introduction to Beyonce the Album Artist.

It's sort of the Rubber Soul to Lemonade 's Sgt. Pepper or the Hunky Dory to Lemonade 's Ziggy Stardust , and like both of those albums, it aged just as well as the grander albums that followed.

Besides "Countdown" -- which remains one of the decade's very best songs -- and "Run the World Girls ," nothing on 4 really sounded like it could've been a Beyonce hit in the previous decade, but these songs remained at a consistent high the way Beyonce albums never had in the past. Its two followups were pretty much received as classics upon arrival, but with its slow-burning success and its status as a pivotal album in hindsight, it feels like -- even nearly a decade later -- 4 's legacy is still being written.

At this time, Pusha T is one of the greatest rappers on the planet, but it still feels like a minor miracle that he released an album as essential as Daytona this far into his career. Though they actually just reunited. Kanye helped rectify Push's career in when he signed him to G. Music and featured him on some of the most iconic Kanye songs of the decade, and their collaborative relationship lead to a very fine solo career for Push. His G. It came out of Kanye's Wyoming sessions, where Ye handled all of the production for a handful of albums, all limited to seven songs.

The unusual approach ended up working best for Push, who used the brief album structure to hone in on what he's best at: rapping his ass off. No frills, no filler, just some of Push's hardest rhymes of the decade over some of the most Old Kanye production of the decade.

Though Kanye made a lot of terrible decisions during his Wyoming sessions -- artistic and otherwise -- his realization that Pusha T needed this kind of production is no small part of what makes Daytona great. The whole thing often sounds more like a lost gem from than a top album of , but it helped Pusha T rise back to the top regardless. When the songs hit like this, it's timeless. Split into three acts, it has an ambitious album structure that's not often seen in the loosie-oriented genre, and it defies the sonic barriers of the genre over and over again.

It has songs that were always destined to be taken as Serious Art like the sexual assault-tackling title track, the good kid, m. ZUU is a great album, but I'd be willing to bet that it clicked more immediately because the sleeper brilliance of TA13OO had finally set in.

Ominous piano and synthetic strings play in the background, drums or a chorus never enter, and a young rap newcomer raps stream-of-consciousness in a mock therapy session about depression, growing up without a father, hollow sexual encounters, and other depths of his psyche, and also gives the mission statement for his collective Odd Future and explains why this weird new group is going to prove to be better than the rap establishment.

This is how Tyler, the Creator opened his debut mixtape Bastard , which arrived for free on the internet on Christmas day in and had a lot of the music world talking by the end of Tyler and Odd Future were tired of the way rap's mainstream looked at the end of the s, and they were ready to change it on their own, no matter how lucrative they did or didn't seem to major labels.

Though majors would eventually realize they wanted to get involved, and they did. Odd Future's rowdy live show became instantly legendary, but the collective's first great album was Tyler's solo debut Bastard , a dark, insular album that showed off a much different side of Tyler than the punk-inspired live shows and sounded like almost nothing else at the time. With every song produced or co-produced by Tyler himself, he presented himself as a musical visionary right off the bat.

Both his rapping and his beats were as eerie as they were innovative, and he matched it with sometimes horrifically dark lyricism. Some of Tyler's early lyrics remain too offensive to re-print, but his artistic integrity almost always overcame his crassness. As we now know, Tyler and his friends did change the face and sound of rap's mainstream, and they continued to evolve in interesting and unexpected ways throughout the decade.

At this point, I'd actually say Tyler's best album is this year's IGOR , a gorgeous, experimental, not-really-rap album that's almost nothing like the music he was making in the early s. OutKast briefly reunited for mostly-festival dates in , but otherwise, the s was the first decade since they formed where they weren't an active, dominant group.

Andre became elusive, dropping guest verses here and there and hinting at a solo album that still hasn't happened. Meanwhile, Big Boi took the opposite route, becoming a very active solo artist who frequently toured and released three full-length albums and a collaborative EP with Phantogram. Sir Lucious Left Foot sounded like the future when it arrived in , with its thick rubbery basslines that -- from Big Boi to LCD Soundsystem to Gorillaz -- were very in style at the time, and that was no small feat for a rapper whose first significant album came out in Popular Atlanta rap went in a very different direction a few years later, but Sir Lucious Left Foot still sounds fresh, and it's still home to some of the most fun songs Big Boi's written since Stankonia.

From the moment OutKast introduced the world to Killer Mike first on a deep cut on Stankonia , then on the gigantic single "The Whole World" , it was obvious that a new Southern rap great was born.

He popped up a couple other times during Southern rap's early s mainstream boom, scoring his own minor hit with "A. Mike was already settling into his role as an underground hero on 's PL3DGE , when he met an unlikely collaborator who would help him reach the heights he was always destined for: New York alt-rap icon El-P.

The pair were introduced by Adult Swim's Jason DeMarco, and they immediately struck up a friendly and artistic relationship that led to El-P producing all 12 songs on Killer Mike's album R. Music , rapping on one of them, and inviting Mike to rap on a song on the El-P album Cancer 4 Cure that came out one week later. I don't know who would've guessed that Killer Mike's Atlanta drawl would've sounded so good over El-P's futuristic, outsider production, but it resulted in Killer Mike's best solo album by a landslide.

From the trunk-rattling assault of "Big Beast" to the incisive political commentary of "Reagan," R. Music saw Killer Mike perfecting everything he had been spending his entire career working towards, and El-P's focused production tied it all together in a way that was more cohesive than any previous Killer Mike album.

The pair connected so well that they decided to stop releasing solo albums and form a group together, Run The Jewels, who went on to dominate the s musical landscape -- within and outside of rap -- and who became a bigger deal than either of these two veteran artists ever were in the past.

It's been a long time coming for both of these guys, and as a duo responsible for some of the decade's best rap music, Run The Jewels deserve the fame. Even from the early days of Odd Future, a lot of people had pegged Earl Sweatshirt as the group's most skilled rapper, and Earl continued to make good on that promise, peaking with the steel-cutting bars of 's I Don't Like Shit, I Don't Go Outside.

What I don't think anyone predicted, though, is that Earl would put traditional rapping on the back burner in order to become the most psychedelic, experimental artist to emerge out of the Odd Future collective. He first took the unexpected turn on 's excellent Some Rap Songs , a swirling, sound-collage song cycle that furthered Earl's ability as a producer and took his music to mind-bending new heights. He proved the new direction was no fluke on 's Feet of Clay , which feels a little more immediate than its predecessor, if only because we're now more used to the path Earl began paving on 's monumental Some Rap Songs.

Atlanta trap became one of the most prevailing trends in s hip hop, and though trap wasn't always an album game -- at least not in the traditional sense -- there's a good argument to be made that if there's one definitive s trap album , it's Future's DS2. Titled as a sequel to his buzzed-about mixtape Dirty Sprite , DS2 came after Future tried to go mainstream with two just-okay major label albums, and then reverted back to his mixtape roots and put out the unstoppable run of Monster, Beast Mode , and 56 Nights that eventually led to him making this proper studio album in the same druggy, rough-around-the-edges style.

It was a big hit, but it wasn't Future trying to go pop; he made pop come to him. Various tracks from the three preceding mixtapes ended up on DS2 's deluxe version the deluxe version is really the one to get , and every other song on the proper album is just as good.

One of the big shifts in rap in the s was rapping about doing lots of drugs, rather than selling them, and DS2 sounds like a rap album that's been doused in a bottle of Robitussin. It's sexed up, drugged up, melancholic, angry, and all kinds of fucked up, and Future delivers every mood with conviction over gorgeous, innovative production from some of trap's key producers Metro Boomin, Southside, Zaytoven.

Within what remains a very crowded subgenre -- including countless subsequent releases by Future himself -- DS2 still stands out as a masterpiece. Nicki Minaj's major label career did not get off to the smoothest start.

After a promising mixtape run and a verse on Kanye's "Monster" that would cement her legacy even if she never recorded another word, Nicki released two so-so albums Pink Friday and Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded that seemed like ploys to make Nicki famous in the teen pop world and didn't do a ton of favors for her career as a rapper. It led to the whole Summer Jam thing , which, now in the age of poptimism, is almost crazy to think even happened.

But then, at the tail end of , Nicki dropped The Pinkprint , the most crucial thing she released since "Monster" and the most masterful album of her career. In case you had forgotten during the era of "Starships," The Pinkprint reminded you not just that Nicki could rap, but that she remained one of the greatest rappers of her generation.

And The Pinkprint wasn't just a return to rap. It shows off a deep, personal side, a fun lighthearted side, and a side where Nicki assures you she's nothing to fuck with. It's not perfect the silly "Anaconda" and the flimsy radio-pop of "The Night Is Still Young" don't do it many favors , but the highs far outweigh the lows, and the deluxe version makes up for the clunkers on the main album.

Bonus track "Shanghai" still stands as one of the decade's hardest and most inventive songs by a rapper of Nicki's popularity. It's a bold move naming your album after one of the most classic rap albums of the past 20 years, but Nicki earned the right and then some. In some ways, The ArchAndroid predicted the genre-crossing path that music as a whole would take throughout the s, and it's impossible to talk about this decade's musical cross pollination without mentioning that this album did it first.

Like Bowie, Janelle proudly wore her influences on her sleeves and paid direct homage to her heroes, and she still does so to this day. But also like Bowie, she managed to do all of that while cultivating a persona that was uniquely her own.

And it's all laid out on her first and still-best album The ArchAndroid. For most of her career, that was fine. But by , some of the most instant-classic albums in the world were coming from stars like Kanye, Beyonce, and frequent Rihanna duetter Drake, so Ri knew she had to do it too. And with ANTI , she did. Drake, who already started embracing atmosphere and minimalism on 's Take Care , reprised his role as Rihanna duetter on one of the best duets they ever released, "Work.

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