(Note: This is one of an occasional and ongoing series of assessments of my favorite albums, parsed by musical genre. Click Here for a series introduction and list of all genres covered, or to be covered, therein).

Background: From 1976 to 1980, I lived on New York’s Long Island, in Nassau County, just a few miles outside of Queens Borough, the easternmost border of New York City, proper. While that era was pretty dire in terms of social, economic, and political happenings in the City, it was an extraordinary era in terms of NYC asserting its primacy as an incubator for some of the most influential and far-reaching music, ever. Punk (in its primal American flavor) was emerging from Manhattan’s Lower East Side, followed by some of the most innovative Post-Punk/No-Wave acts, who remained in the shadows, while their more mainstream/sanitized peers broke into popular consciousness via the record industry’s marketing of New Wave as the next big thing.

At the northern end of the City, in Bronx Borough, another musical wave was building: Hip-Hop/Rap. (While those terms are often used interchangeably, the best distinction I can make between them is that Rap is the rhyming poetry offered by MCs, while Hip-Hop is the broader cultural movement, incorporating fashion, production, artwork, DJing, etc., into a holistic approach to life and its soundtracks). The birth date of Hip-Hop is is generally cited as August 11, 1973, when DJ Kool Herc deployed his unique “Merry-Go-Round” approach at a party he co-hosted with his sister at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. Herc’s critical technique involved a recognition that dancers most enjoyed “the break” (an instrumental, often percussive interlude within the verse/chorus structure of most early funk/soul records), even though those groove-heavy interludes were too short to move a party very long.

Herc solved the problem of the (short) break by deploying two turntables, bouncing between the two, to either extend the break from one song as long as necessary, or to cut between killer breaks from multiple songs. He also used a microphone to exhort the party-goers to move, building on dub/reggae traditions associated with “toasting” atop “sound system” PA/turntable set-ups. (Herc was born in Jamaica, moving to New York City with his family when he was 13 years old). The 1520 Sedgwick party was a cultural hand grenade, the fragments of its concussions rapidly spreading across the Bronx and into the other boroughs, with rival crews of DJs and MCs vying to be the kings/queens of their audio domains.

I wasn’t going into those parts of the City at that time, but having access to local arts coverage did give me an awareness of the burgeoning Hip-Hop scene as something interesting and worthy of exploration before it really broke big, commercially, with The Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight,” the first Rap song to break the Top 40 charts, in late 1979/early 1980. (Reggae’s “toasting” morphed into the American “rapping” as the descriptor for the vocal style, picking up the use of “rap” as a late ’60s/early ’70s term for frank conversation or message-sending between in-the-know individuals). Less than a year later, Blondie scored the first Billboard #1 Hip-Hop inflected song with their disco/rap/rock mash-up, “Rapture.”

I liked both of those songs well enough, at the time, though they both felt a bit like novelty numbers (as evidenced by their self-referential titles), and neither of them really made me feel like I was hearing something musically revelatory, since both were based on familiar rhythms and instrumental sounds, played on traditional instruments. Much more interesting to me were the likes of Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash, who built on DJ Kool Herc’s turntable-based instrumental approach, developing it through early sampling, looping, cutting, and scratching techniques. Flash’s MC posse, The Furious Five, then added trenchant social commentary to the mix with such awesome singles as “White Lines (Don’t Don’t Do It)” and “The Message.” But, personally, it wasn’t until a few years later when I had my own magical “A-HA!” moment, when all of those conceptually interesting pieces came together into a greater whole that blew my mind, entirely. The catalyst for that moment? Public Enemy.

I first heard of (and heard) PE after their debut album, Yo! Bum Rush the Show, dropped in 1987. They received a lot of attention in the music press of the era, and they made me rethink what it meant to be a member of a musical group when I first read about and listened to them, as most of the people who appeared in their press shots of the era didn’t actually sing or play any instruments, in the traditional uses of those verbs. They really cemented their standing as one of my favorite acts a couple of years later, when Marcia and I went to see Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing (one of my all-time favorite films) in Washington DC on or very near to its release date. That great film opens with Rosie Perez dancing and boxing on the big screen with Public Enemy’s most lasting anthem, “Fight the Power,”  just absolutely kicking!!! It remains the only time I can ever recall an audience clapping, standing, and whooping for a film’s opening credit segment. (You should watch it now).

Hip-Hop culture and Rap music have obviously blossomed globally in a variety of ways in the decades since Do The Right Thing, cross-pollinating with other genres, developing an amazing array of local styles/flavors (both in the United States and abroad), topping the charts with friendly rhythms/flows/melodies, while continuing to challenge, abrade, and inspire in a variety of experimental and underground idioms. I would argue that it vies with metal as the world’s most adaptable and oft-attempted musical idiom, both of them recognizable bridges between cultures and places with no other common bonds between them. It’s a global language at this point, with its critical core meanings communicated by break and flow, regardless of their original languages or rhythmic sources. I’m glad that DJ Kool Herc is still with us, recognized as The Father of Hip-Hop, able to witness the massive magic his pioneering work wrought on the musical world around us.

MY TEN FAVORITE HIP-HOP/RAP ALBUMS EVER (IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER)

1. Public Enemy, Fear of Black Planet (1990): As noted in the introduction above, “Fight the Power” was the breakthrough song for me in terms of my deep personal appreciation for Hip-Hop. It came out as a single in 1989, then was included on this album a year later. Fear is brilliant (and still trenchant), lyrically and musically, from open to close; its title song later inspired an essay I wrote called Fear of White Radio.

2. Cypress Hill, Black Sunday (1993): Cypress Hill were the first rap performers of Latin-American descent to trouble the pop music charts, and they were right up there with Snopp Dogg on pioneering the centrality of marijuana within their creative idiom. Black Sunday was their sophomore album, and the one where DJ Muggs really mastered his laconic, yet powerful, approach to crafting beats for stoners to dance to.

3. Cannibal Ox, The Cold Vein (2001): Cannibal Ox featured Vast Aire and Vordul Mega as MCs, with the then-emergent producer El-P (more on him below) handling the beats and beds. The sound of The Cold Vein (the only album the original trio produced) felt radical in its time, as much inspired by motorik, ambient, or art-rock as it was to breaks culled from the Chic back-catalog. It still feels fresh today, due to that innovation.

4. dälek, Absence (2005): New Jersey’s Will Brooks has been leading dälek since the mid-’90s, with a variety of DJs and producers helping him bring his musical visions to life. Brooks has also been one of the most active cross-pollinators in Hip-Hop, working with such legendary non-Hip-Hop artists as Charles Hayward, Faust, Mats Gustafsson, and The Young Gods, making music that sounds like nothing and nobody else, ever.

5. Edan, Beauty and the Beat (2005): Edan Portnoy was raised in the Washington, DC suburbs, the child of Israeli immigrants. He began writing Rap songs in high school, attended (but didn’t graduate from) Berklee College of Music, and released his first disc in 2002. Beauty and the Beat was his sophomore album, and it is filled with wonderful guests, lyrics exploring musical history, and fantastic samples/beats.

6. Mos Def, The Ecstatic (2009): Mos Def was the MC name of Brooklyn’s Dante Terrell Smith; he now uses Yasiin Bey for his creative endeavors, which include music, acting, and activism. Bey first broke into public consciousness as one-half of Black Star, with fellow MC/producer Talib Kweli. The Ecstatic was his fourth solo album, after which he largely walked away from music-making. I gave it my Album of the Year nod in 2009.

7. MF Doom, Unexpected Guests (2009): MF Doom (Daniel Dumile) was a British-American artist (he died in 2020) who is best known as half of Madvillain (with producer Madlib); their 2004 Madvillainy is a regular star of “All-Time Best” lists like this one. As much as I love that disc, I enjoy Unexpected Guests even more, for its masterful culling of 17 brilliant singles featuring Doom in one capacity or another.

8. Death Grips, Government Plates (2013): Death Grips are a California-based trio featuring MC Ride, drummer Zach Hill and keyboardist Andy Morin. (The latter may or may not still be in the group; they are notoriously obscure about sharing news/facts). While their semi-fame is often anchored as much in their obstreperousness as it is in their music, their albums are masterfully dense, powerful, experimental, and strange.

9. Chance the Rapper, Coloring Book (2016): We lived in Chance’s home town, Chicago, from 2015-2019, just as he was breaking huge beyond the Windy City’s confines. Coloring Book is, for me, his absolute masterwork, and it was magic to see the outpouring of Chance love in Chicago at the time, just as he was doing amazing work in giving back to his beloved community. Perfect record, perfect time, perfect place.

10. Run The Jewels, RTJ4 (2020): Another of my Album of the Year entries, RTJ4 is the fourth collaboration between El-P and Killer Mike, who’d first made his name as a guest artist with Outkast. Something magical happens when Mike and El-P work together, a truly sublime synthesis of messages, styles, and sounds. Each of their records has been better than the one preceding it, so here’s hoping for RTJ5, sooner rather than later.

As I will do for each installment in the Genre Delve series, I’ve linked my own personally-curated Spotify playlist related to this article, below. You can sample songs from the albums and artists cited here, and also other genre favorites to give them setting and context. As always, I welcome your thoughts and reactions to my list, and your recommendations or suggestions for other things that I might find interesting.