Hip-Hop has spoiled us. In the 50 years since a group of kids decided to throw a party in the Bronx, the genre has grown and blossomed in ways Kool Herc couldn’t have imagined. Hip-hop left New York and moved south to Atlanta, Miami, Memphis, and Houston, and west to Chicago and St. Louis. It took up shop out in Los Angeles and The Bay Area and reinvented itself before moving back across the country. And in that time, as it worked its way across this country, we’ve been fortunate to experience a seemingly endless amount of incredible, culture-shifting, delectable, classic albums.
There have been so many amazing albums that it’s damn near impossible to capture them all in one list. You can point to any corner of the map and find 50 albums that could be the best album ever made. As a matter of fact, you’ve probably already had this conversation multiple times at parties or over dinner or in your various group chats. It’s a tough nut to crack. But, it’s a challenge we relish.
So, to round off Black Music Month, we decided to attempt the impossible and rank the 100 greatest rap albums of all time. Yep, of all time — and, yep, from all regions. A few members of our staff huddled to come up with a list of albums we believe represent the best of what the genre has given us over the past 50 years. We had a few criteria when deciding: We only included full-length projects that were commercially released, so no mixtapes or EPs. We took into account the world into which the album was released: Did it break new ground or was it just a different version of a more popular album? We weighed the album’s impact and how it’s endured over time: Did it change the game? Do people still play it? And, of course, since we’re Billboard, we took into account how the albums performed commercially — though ultimately, that was a lesser consideration.
To make this more digestible, we’ve been rolling the list out 25 albums at a time. Now we’ve come to the top 50. Today (July 1), we’ll go through 50 to 26, and next week, we’ll reveal what we here at Billboard believe are the 25 greatest hip-hop albums of all time. As ever, getting to 100 was a massive undertaking. There are albums you love that didn’t make the list. That’s just how it goes, but if there are projects you strongly believe deserved to be on the list, let us know.
Enjoy.
