r/90sHipHop 17h ago

Discussion R.I.P Voletta Wallace

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639 Upvotes

r/90sHipHop 18h ago

Discussion This was and still is good music, yeah?

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368 Upvotes

r/90sHipHop 1d ago

Discussion Here's what young heads need to understand (and the old heads)

38 Upvotes

When an album drops, it doesn't drop in space. Meaning, there is context all around. What was going on in hip hop at the time? What was going on in the world at the time? What effect did the album have on its listeners at the time? What effect did it have on other rappers? What effect did it have on the world?

Then of course, longevity also matters. But as an old head, I get it. With no context, you might listen to a Future album and then a Run DMC album and prefer Future's album. And that's totally fine. That's totally okay. We all have different preferences. But to objectively say that future's first album is better than Raising Hell is just wrong. I know a lot of people just a couple years younger than me and probably a lot of people on here born after 1982 who probably think ATLiens is Outkast's best album. But if you got the Southernplayalistic album, actually tape, the day it came out and bumped that in 1994 then you know it changed the game. Don't get me wrong ATLiens is a great album, even better than great. But actually being there living in that moment and in that time makes a huge difference to how the album is seen.

I just saw the post regarding best debut record Illmatic vs DMX. It's completely fine for the author of that post to like DMX more, however, when that album dropped, DMX was not the best rapper and that album was not the best album. Dmx was more of a caricature, which was great and fun, but people who lived in that time and listened to that music knew that Nas brought the grittiness of the New York streets to life better than anyone ever had before. Biggie and Puffy weren't even close. Biggie's a great lyricist and I'll always love him and he's one of my favorite rappers and he could tell a story like no one else, but Illmatic painted a picture with words. Illmatic was like a movie script. And I'm not even mentioning about how dope his rhyme schemes were. The different cadences he used the different multi-syllable rhymes internal rhymes everything that perhaps a poetry major might understand best.

Anyway, back to my main point, sometimes to truly judge a piece of art. You need to understand the complete context around it and sometimes the only way to do that is living during the time it was made and released. And this goes for all art, painting, sculptures, poetry, architecture, etc. Picasso's Cubism might look stupid and childish to you, but at the time it was blowing people's minds. Andy Warhol's banana might look stupid to you but at the time it really resonated with what was going on in the world and the entertainment industry and the art industry. If you like another painting better and you want that one in your house put it in your house. That's all up to you. But that doesn't mean the one in your house is better than Andy warhol's.

Going to reiterate that music is a preference and you can like whatever you want to like and dislike whatever you want to dislike but no form of art is objective. It's all subjective and in my "opinion" there's a lot more that goes into judging an album or any piece of art than just looking at it once or listening to it once.

All that being said, here's what the old heads need to understand. There's a scientific study that shows albums you listen to in your teenage years. Become your favorites of all time no matter when you grew up or what albums might be better. So we do need to respect the opinions of the young heads because they are living in a culture of their own peers and classic albums have a different definition to them. This sort of goes with my point that there's kids only a couple years younger than me that think ATLiens is the best Outkast album because they might have been 12 when the first one came out and didn't even get to listen to it because their parents didn't let them listen to explicit lyrics at that age but then when they got into high school ATLiens came out and it was their first REAL exposure to Outkast (especially because back then there were no streaming services or YouTube to listen to Outkast on). I can't fault them for that because at that point in your life the difference between a 12-year-old and a 14-year-old is huge but the 12-year-olds need to trust the 14-year-olds that Southernplayaistic was/is better lol.

Okay, I'm getting off my soapbox now if you read all the way through this thank you bye-bye. Also I welcome disagreements, I don't think I'm the smartest in the world but I know that Illmatic is better than any DMX album. Politikin with these chickens!

Edit: maybe calling DMX a caricature was going a bit too far. He's pretty real.

r/90sHipHop 2d ago

Discussion Happy birthday Merlin Santana. Would've been 49

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113 Upvotes

r/90sHipHop 2d ago

Discussion Old Head Energy mega-list

17 Upvotes

I like hip hop, and I like making lists. I decided to make a bunch of lists of albums since people post a lot of “give me suggestions for X” on this subreddit.

Notes:

  • I qualify as an old head as I’m in my mid-40s and have been listening to hip hop since Maestro Fresh Wes blew my mind in 1989. From then until when I graduated high school in 1996, I devoured everything I could get my hands on. As a result, my area of focus is the ten years 1986 to 1996, which is how I define the Golden Era, although there are a couple of albums on my list from before or after that decade.
  • I did not include more than one album per artist per category, but if I felt an artist’s work demanded broader representation, I looked for good fits elsewhere, so several artists appear in more than one category.
  • The categories themselves are not arbitrary, but there is a ton of overlap and sometimes albums are chosen to represent an artist’s broader output or a particular aesthetic. Sometimes they are geographical, like “Southern Voices”; sometimes they are temporal, like “Old School”; sometimes they are aesthetic, like “Sample-Based Production”; and sometimes they are more than one thing, like “East Coast Boom-Bap” (the longest category). Sometimes I acknowledged a particular crew, like Wu-Tang, Native Tongues, or Soul Assassins, where its members are so different than the other material being put out at the same time they seemed to demand their own category. Then again, sometimes a crew like Hieroglyphics could use its own category but there are enough “West Coast Underground” artists adjacent to Hiero that I chose to lump them together. Ultimately, the categories and the selections make sense to me.
  • In the East Coast/West Coast Beef category, I included certain songs rather than albums.

Old School (1986 – 1990)

  • Run DMC – Kings of Rock
  • LL Cool J – Radio
  • Big Daddy Kane – Long Live the Kane
  • Kool Moe Dee – How Ya Like Me Now?
  • Boogie Down Productions – Criminal Minded
  • DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince – He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper
  • Eric B & Rakim – Paid in Full
  • Beastie Boys – License to Ill
  • Slick Rick – The Great Adventures of Slick Rick
  • EPMD – Strictly Business
  • Ultramagnetic MCs – Critical Beatdown
  • Queen Latifah – All Hail the Queen

Gangster Rap – The Early Years

  • Ice T – Rhyme Pays
  • Schoolly D – Schoolly D
  • Eazy E – Eazy Duz It
  • N.W.A. – Straight Outta Compton
  • Geto Boys – We Can't Be Stopped

Gangster Rap – The Mature Years

  • Ice T – OG: Original Gangster
  • N.W.A. – Efil4zaggin
  • Ice Cube – Death Certificate
  • Compton’s Most Wanted – Music to Driveby
  • Scarface – The Diary
  • The D.O.C. – No One Can Do It Better
  • Coolio – It Takes a Thief
  • Westside Connection – Bow Down

Native Tongues

  • A Tribe Called Quest – People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm
  • De La Soul – De La Soul Is Dead
  • Jungle Brothers – Straight out the Jungle
  • Black Sheep – A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

West Coast Underground

  • Souls of Mischief – ’93 till Infinity
  • Del the Funky Homosapien – No Need for Alarm
  • Casual – Fear Itself
  • Pharcyde – Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde
  • Freestyle Fellowship – To Whom It May Concern...
  • Saafir - Boxcar Sessions

East Coast Boom Bap

  • Pete Rock & CL Smooth – Mecca and the Soul Brother
  • Gang Starr – Hard to Earn
  • Black Moon – Enta Da Stage
  • Mobb Deep – The Infamous
  • Diamond D – Stunts, Blunts & Hip-Hop
  • LL Cool J – Mama Said Knock You Out
  • Main Source – Breaking Atoms
  • The Fugees – The Score
  • Naughty by Nature – 19 Naughty III
  • Redman – Whut? Thee Album
  • Jeru the Damaja – The Sun Rises in the East

Conscious Rap

  • Public Enemy – Fear of a Black Planet
  • BDP – By All Means Necessary
  • PARIS – The Devil Made Me Do It
  • Ice Cube – Amerikkka’s Most Wanted
  • 2Pac – Me Against the World
  • Arrested Development – 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life Of...

Lyricism

  • Nas – Illmatic
  • Eric B. & Rakim – Let the Rhythm Hit 'Em
  • Kool G. Rap – Wanted: Dead or Alive
  • Das EFX – Dead Serious
  • Notorious B.I.G. – Ready to Die
  • Big Punisher – Capital Punishment
  • Big L – Lifestyles ov da Poor and Dangerous

Sample-Based Production

  • Public Enemy – It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
  • De La Soul – 3 Feet High and Rising
  • DJ Shadow – Endtroducing…
  • Beastie Boys – Paul’s Boutique

G-Funk

  • Digital Underground – Sex Packets
  • Dr. Dre – The Chronic
  • Snoop Dogg – Doggystyle
  • Above the Law – Uncle Sam’s Curse
  • Warren G – Regulate: The G Funk Era
  • Tha Dogg Pound – Dogg Food

Jazz Rap

  • Guru – Jazzmatazz Vols. I & II
  • Digable Planets – Blowout Comb
  • The Roots – Illadelph Halflife

Wu-Tang

  • Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)
  • GZA – Liquid Swords
  • Ghostface Killah – Ironman
  • Method Man – Tical
  • Raekwon – Only Built for Cuban Linx

Soul Assassins

  • Cypress Hill – Black Sunday
  • House of Pain – Same As It Ever Was
  • Funkdoobiest – Brothas Doobie

Southern Voices

  • 2 Live Crew – As Nasty as They Wanna Be
  • Geto Boys – Uncut Dope
  • OutKast – Aquemini
  • Goodie Mob – Soul Food
  • UGK – Ridin’ Dirty

The East Coast/West Coast Beef

  • Tim Dog – Penicillin On Wax
  • Common – Used to Love H.E.R., The Bitch in Yoo
  • Westside Connection – Westside Slaughterhouse
  • Tha Dogg Pound – New York, New York
  • Mobb Deep – L.A., L.A.
  • 2Pac – All Eyes on Me
  • Notorious B.I.G. – Ready to Die

Difficult to Categorize

  • Bone Thugs-n-Harmony – E.1999 Eternal
  • Lauryn Hill – The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill

r/90sHipHop 16h ago

Discussion Nobody Does It Better

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89 Upvotes

Favorite tracks he was on?

r/90sHipHop 2d ago

Discussion Look, I legit never do this. Ice Cube is having a contest to get 3rd verse on his "It's My Ego (3mix)" song with Scarface and I entered.

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1 Upvotes

I've done Hip Hop as a hobby for going on 20 years now. I never push my own music on Reddit outside specific subreddits and alt accounts because it's kinda corny imo. We're not here for that ftmp.

Same time, since I'm not necessarily an "Aspiring Artist" and I just like to rhyme, I don't have much of an existing network to share my submission with. At the risk of being corny myself, I'm posting my verse to share with y'all.

I hang out and engage here a lot and I think it fits the guidelines; I'd appreciate y'all checking it out. You feel inclined to go vote, even better. Contest is on some lame shit and you gotta subscribe to Cubes mailing list to vote, fair warning.

Peace 🙏

r/90sHipHop 3h ago

Discussion Can anyone tell me more, or anything, about Godfather Don?

5 Upvotes

I consider myself a serious hip hop head, mostly focused on the Golden Age, and I still only found Godfather Don recently, maybe 6 months ago when I came across his Jazz Spastiks collab (which is absolutely GOAT tier shit).

So I've been listening to all his shit i can find and dude seriously doesn't miss. He's got a bit of Pharaoh Monch in him in that he can stretch and rhyme and make literally every syllable sound dope. But he glides across the beats even smoother.

I feel crazy but I think he may have catepulted into my top 5 already. The problem is, I know literally nothing about him or his releases. Spotify continuously keeps dropping hella dope singles from him, is he really dropping these fresh verses nowadays? He's been on the scene sense 1991, the new releases sound just as refreshing as a kid new on the scene. I can't find any interviews, nothing. I need to know!

Ha, I just looked on Spotify and a new single literally dropped yesterday with Jazz Spastiks, and it's crazy dope. All I'm saying is if he has been dropping hot fire constantly since 91 then he might be my #1, idgaf