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Showing posts from December, 2005
Hypestyles' Top 25 Hip-Hop LPs (circa 1980 – 1995) In a recent Rolling Stone article, there was a feature with Chris Rock’s Top 25 hip-hop/rap albums of all time. For whatever reason, it inspired me to come up with my own. I usually try to avoid ‘Top (fill in the blank)’ lists. For one thing, I’m usually at a lack for words to defend my choices other than to say "I just dig it". I’m not the best debater, and when it comes to my own personal tastes, I have little interest in trying to be. As the saying goes, I may not know art, but I know what I like. I’ve tried to select LPs where I’ve tended to listen to them all the way through, or at least 90%. I’ve also tried to keep things to one LP per artist, wherever possible, though a few double-entries may have slipped through. I’ve also put a specific time frame on the entries. Hip-hop’s ‘golden age’ varies from person to person. For my purposes, I’d place it from roughly ’84 to ’94, as my own tastes in hip-hop were pretty muc
Rise of the Dirty South & are Hip-Hop 'Girl Groups' a Thing of the Past? Watching this year’s Vibe Awards, I was reminded of something- I really don’t relate very well to the current generation of rappers and R&B singers. Most of the rappers in attendance- Mike Jones, Paul Wall, Young Jeezy, Lil’ Wayne, etc., were from the south. After years of neglect, southern hip-hop can claim dominance over both coasts. It’s great that hip-hop’s regional diversity hasn’t stalled. Still, I can’t front, I really don’t buy much southern rap at all. As much as I love the now old-school Geto Boys, they’re almost the only southern rap act I’ve really latched on to over the years. Fellow southern rap pioneers 2 Live Crew had any number of street hits, but I never bought a record from them—but I do have a copy of Luke’s Uncle Luke CD that I literally found discarded on the streets. Out of all of Outkast’s LPs I only have Speakerboxx/Love Below. If Goodie Mob has a best-of set, I might cop t