For all the hip-hoppers on the board, what would you call your favorite rap album - if forced to pick? Not to say it won't change, because Lords know it will always keep changing for us (not least of all because there is so much further to go with the genre) - but at this point in your life, where you're at right now, what is the album that you feel closest to on a real level? And What?

For me, I've got to go with Rakim's 18th Letter. My uncle had been a DJ in Detroit, and had it stashed in a crate of records he sold me many years ago when in need of some cash. He regrets it, I know, but I still thank him for it - 18th Letter is nothing but big phat dopey class - dumb as slack. So good. Still gets regular rotation four or five years later, and has yet to be topped by Rakim himself - though Seventh Seal was damned good.

I was tempted to go with Busta Rhyme's ELE or even The Coming - because those were the albums that really got me into rap and hip-hop culture in general, but Busta never really says much of anything other than biscuit.

I'm not much into rap, so I tend to like individual songs more than albums. I guess that makes me a poser to some extent. Ah, well I can't do anything about it. Anyway, (off the top of my head) some of the songs I dig...

Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five - The Message
Hopsin - Ill Mind of Hopsin 5
Busta Rhymes - Woo Ha
Eminem - Stan, Cleanin Out My Closet, Way I Am
Outkast - Hey Ya

Mostly popular/well-known stuff. Don't know if any of that counts as hip hop as opposed to rap. I don't even know the difference, and have seen people argue about whether there even is a difference. *shrugs*

Correct me if I'm wrong - I always thought rapping was the vocal style, and hip-hop was the genre.

Aesop Rock's Skelethon and Illogic's Celestial Clockwork are unlikely to leave my playlist for the next decade.

I'll bite. Caveat: I'm no connoisseur; my tastes here are limited.

DMX-It's Dark And Hell Is Hot

An absolutely violent listening experience. Some of the most brutal lyrics I've ever heard, delivered with such extreme intensity over probably the most aggressive rhythmical backdrop known to the genre. "Ruff Ryders Antnem", "Fuckin Wit D", "Get At Me Dog", "X Is Coming", "How's It Goin Down", and "Stop Being Greedy" stand out on an otherwise stellar record.

It's like the death metal of rap.

Departure by nujabes and take me to your leader by king geadorah. I'm just getting into rap so i dont have much to pick from yet

dälek - Absence is a long time favourite of mine. The heavy and thick experimentation of rap and noise/industrial just totally did it for me. I also love The Palmer Squares. Not sure which of their two EP's I prefer. Their mixture of goofyness and intellect is extremly enjoyable.

Wow this going to be tough. I really like Aesop Rock's Labour Days. Dude got great flow coupled with lyricism that is insane, but at the same time has so much meaning. I can spin this album every day without getting bored. I gotta give props to Cannibal Ox - The Cold Vein too, the production on that album is ace and the lyricism on it is breathtaking. Vordul kicks ass too.

well I kind of dug Cypress Hill back in the day, and have some kind of nostalgia for RUN DMC and the early Beastie Boys. I dont really listen to much rap though. Not really my thing, but I don't "hate" on rap either. Most of the newer club rap stuff, where all they rap about is how much money they have, riding around in limos popping bottles in clubs with tha ladies, etc- I got no time for most of that bullshit.

Pretty sure rap is a genre and hip hop is a subculture.

I feel you there, sir. I always liked DMX. His lyrics are wild. I feel the same way about The Predator by Ice Cube. Recorded during the LA Riots, no less.

Doin' Thangs.



Album art that amazing trumps trumps all no matter how crappy the actual music is.

(Seriously though, the only straight rap I really listen to is select stuff from NWA, Ice Cube, Ice T, and Public Enemy. If I can branch out into rap rock though, the first RAtM record takes the cake.)

I'm not super familiar with the genre, but I quite like Fear of A Black Planet. I just love Chuck D's voice, and the samples are composed together pretty damn well.

Ah yes...Public Enemy. That's another rap band I have always admired and respected. I believe it was that "Fear of a Black Planet" album which even sampled Slayer's "Angel of Death" (on "Channel Zero" although that is not the only reason I like that album.)

I don't listen to much rap but I am a huge fan of Greydon Square. My favorite album would have to be Type II: The Kardashev Scale.

I would have to say Snoop Dogg's debut, Doggystyle. Alongside Straight Outta Compton and, possibly, MC Ren's Shock of the Hour, it's the only rap album where I can listen to the first song through to the last and not get bored somewhere in between. While it does have silly interludes that plague most rap albums, they aren't as bad as many others I've heard.

Toss up between Ice Cube's Lethal Injection, Mobb Deep's The Infamous, and Nas' Illmatic. Those three are dark, catchy, and filthy. Great beats and great raps. Not a huge rap fan but Ice Cube's early stuff in particular rules. Straight Outta Compton is another brilliant one.

Seconding the DMX mention. Cool debut.

I would listen to hip hop more if I found good artists more often. My top three hip hop albums would probably be:

Aesop Rock: Labor Days
El-P: I'll Sleep When You're Dead
Cannibal Ox: The Cold Vein

Definitive Jux put out quite a few good albums.

toss up between a few, not sure if I can make up my mind. Contenders:

* 36 Chambers
* onyx - "backdafuckup"
*Method Man - "Tical"
* Cannibal Ox - "The cold Vein"
*Gravediggaz - "6 feet deep/Niggamortis"
*Raekwan - "only built for cuban linx"

So you can pretty much tell the style I'm into.

Aside from some of the more obvious classics mentioned, I'll always keep my copies of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony's Creepin on ah Come Up and E. 1999 Eternal within arm's reach. "1st of Tha Month" was just perfect to chill to during the summer for the last couple of years I was in elementary school.

I like a lot of styles of hip-hop, but I'm particularly partial to the classic East Coast boom-bap sound. Stuff like Wu-Tang Clan (and their various solo albums), Nas and Onyx is dope as fuck.

You can never go wrong with Nujabes.

I only own a handful of hip hop albums. Most of the time when I listen to rap music, it's with my friends who listen mostly to MP3s and aren't album collectors like me. As a result I'm more familiar with bands and songs as opposed to actual albums. So my favourite albums are KRS-One's "Return of the Boom Bap", Public Enemy's "Fear of a Black Planet" and The Streets' first two albums. But I also really like the music of Cypress Hill, Soul Assassins, Psycho Realm (pretty much anything that B-Real has been affiliated with), Immortal Technique, Beastie Boys, MC Chris, and classic stuff like NWA, Wu-Tang, Eric B & Rakim, Ice-T etc.

Since a few people have already mentioned Cannibal Ox's album, in case nobody else had heard, they are getting ready to record a new one to be released this year. Just found out they got a Kickstarter to fund the record:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/393 ... ox-returns

Artificial Kid - Numero 47 (2009)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwTIaEDrC58
http://grooveshark.com/#!/album/Numero+47/5751444
conscious/cyberpunk rap





Uochi Toki - Libro audio (2009)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2pZ8C7ODSs
http://grooveshark.com/#!/album/Libro+Audio/4880703
experimental/"stream of consciousness" rap



both from Italy
"international" choice: Cannibal Ox - The Cold Vein

Eminem: pretty much anything
Immortal Technique: Revolutionary vols. 1 and 2
Lupe Fiasco: Food and Liquor II
One.Be.Lo: S.O.N.O.G.R.A.M.

One.Be.Lo. is fucking awesome.

I don't like to do rankings and shit like that anymore but my all time favorite would be 36 Chambers.



If it is then someone better let every DJ dropping instrumentals know. LOL.

Nah, the first dude is right. Rapping is a style of vocalization, like singing or toasting would be. Hip Hop is the umbrella genre under which lots of this stuff would fall. There's a hip hop subculture just like there is a metal subculture with fashion, dance, history, various branches with diametrically opposed viewpoints, blah blah blah.

I love Calle 13, that guy can write some fine lyrics, my favorite album would be Entren los que Quieran

Calma Pueblo (ft. Omar Rodriguez from The Mars Volta)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVe305dwLck

Digo lo que Pienso
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hv8W-qt7qS8

Also, Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise is pretty cool too.

Wu-Tang Forever - simply put, one of the greatest albums of all time. RZA's production is spot-on, and because of this, it has easily some of best beats of all time. Every single member is on point on this album too, and this was when the Clan became very self-aware and started speaking that Wu, that Wisdom, educating the masses through poetry and art. Some of the greatest lyricism, flows, and collaborations in rap history. Just flawless, and probably the only "perfect" hip-hop album (I say that in quotes because...."Black Shampoo"...some on....shit's terrible).

Also, let's not even talk about each member's solo career, fucking Tical? Liquid Swords, Pretty Tony, Fishscale, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx....ugh....I could go on and on. Ghostface was a goddamn machine from 92-99, dude was not only putting out solo mixtapes, but was doing like 40% of the Wu's lyrics and was collaborating on like five or six songs on everyone else's album - proving he's just one of the best, and his story-telling is the best in the game. I think Ghostface wrote more lyrics in those seven years that any other artist.....phenom.

Also, real classic? Mobb Deep - The Infamous, Ozzy's definitely right - that shit is insane. Just thuggery, gutteral and grimy beats, but aso a sense of purpose, black culture and an odd pacing of realism. "Shook Ones pt. 2" is hands down one of the best rap songs of all time.

Cannibal Ox's - The Cold Vein is like sci-fi meets Bauhaus meets the Wu-Tang. Just eerie beats, strange atypical flows, voices and an incredible sense of structure - it's a long album, and it's a detailed album - but it never really feels stagnant or drawn out. Really amazing lyricism. Seriously, listen to this, that's straight killer shit. That back and forth is amazing, and that beat? Shit, it's like listening to Throbbing Gristle, so fucking esoteric.

Ice Cube's mother fucking Predator needs no explanation, just listen to this shit.

J. Cole's Cole World single-handedly brought back that self-aware "educated" rap, fighting the dilemmas that face a college-educated black man in America, trying to fit in with both the black street crowds and the white kids who seem to eat up his rap - a really excellent look at modern rap as well, bringing back being an MC instead of being a "rapper". The same exact thing can be said about Kendrick Lamar's Good Kid, M.A.A.D City, seriously - dat beat.

Oh, and yeah, the classic among classics - the king of kings - Paid in Full. That whole album is just the greatest. That flow, those lyrics, the aesthetic - fucking aces, man.

I don't know much about rap at all, but I do like some of it.
This isn't exactly my favorite (can't say I have one) but I dig it a lot:



Butcher's Harem - Snuff Porn Gore

People call it a mix of hip-hop and goregrind. I like the growliness of the vocals and the rhymes are actually pretty fucking fun to listen to (Carcassesque medical/forensic lingo) and flow really well. Something about the fact that the lyrics are intelligible makes it more macabre than all those brutal dm bands.

Song:

that....was...no... :/

sorry, man, just cannot get into that at all....just seems terrible.

Fair enough. I find it intriguing, especially knowing that there is an entire underground subgenre/culture of this kind of gore hip hop. It's certainly different, and the songs are generally hit-or-miss.

According to my last.fm my most-played hip-hop album is Ill Bill's solo debut, and that's certainly a great album that pretty openly caters to metalheads as much as it does hip-hop fans; he namedrops metal band and musician names pretty frequently, and hell, he was even in a legit OSDM band at one point. Plus, the subject matter should be pretty easy for a good chunk of metalheads to identify with. Him and related artists (Necro, Non Phixion etc) are absolutely worth checking out for anyone here with any remote taste in hip-hop.

My absolute favorite hip-hop album, though, would have to be dälek's Absence. Filled with brilliantly worded poetry, desolate, bleak soundscapes and a powerful, meaningful message; I'm really surprised no one's brought them up yet. Great fucking band.

Per Africa Bambaataa rap is the term for the vocalization and instrumentals. Hip-hop is a cultural movement built on different pillars - rap music being one, break dancing another, graff writing another, etc. So, hip-hop is not really a musical term.

I have never been much of a rap fan, but I did get turned onto Public Enemy by way of my friends in Anthrax. Fear Of A Black Planet is the only rap album that I have ever liked. Unless you count the Body Count discography.

I respect AB deeply but that term has evolved a great deal. I don't think of what DJ Shadow does as being "rap" because it isn't. There's no rapping. It sure as hell is "hip hop" though. I wouldn't hold him accountable to defining hip hop any more than most of M-A would hold Mike Saunders or Barry Gifford accountable for determining what the definition of "heavy metal" is.

This is a really tough decision for me but I'd have to say Lil B's "Crime Fetish" even though it's a mixtape. He's definitely my favorite rapper as of lately, he's the only one doing his own thing in the rap game and I respect that beyond belief.

I agree with most of what Philosophical Frog mentioned. Aside from that I'm really fond of old southern hip hop and have been slowing working my way through DJ Screw's mixtapes (I'm on #62 right now). A real standout album I haven't seen mentioned yet is UGK - Ridin' Dirty. It's worth a listen for Pimp C's verse on "Hi Life" alone.

I also revere ODB's Return to the 36 Chambers.

Lil B is such a hipster.