BABENZELE

11) Count Bass D “Dwight Spitz”   

         

     Count Bass D was a multi-instrumentalist jazz artist before a hip-hop musician, and it shows in his warm and subtly complex production; beautifully truncated samples are swaddled in layers of live instrumentation, golden aged hip-hop boom-bap is complimented with intelligent chord progressions and a refined, stately sonic pallette. It’s all compelling and never pretentious or overwrought, a modest yet sophisticated musical canvas over which the Count weaves every man rhymes about such humane and humbling matters as being a struggling family man expecting a third child, expanding his craft and carving a space for himself in the expanding multiverse of hip-hop. It’s a charismatic and immediately satisfying album, both accomplished and charmingly modest, and among the most over-looked albums from the last decade of hip-hop.

12) Outkast “Speakerboxxx/ The Love Below”

Having already established themselves as one of the most adventurous outfits in mainstream hip-hop, Outkast reached their commercial apex with their most experimental offering yet; a double album essentially serving as a solo record from each artist but released under the singular spirit of the Outkast brand. Andre 3000 branched further out into his own post-rap soul-pop hybrid, while Big Boi responded with a behemoth of a dirty south hip-hop album, tracks dripping with funky horn lines and club destroying 808 beats. The result is a cohesive yet schizoid hip-hop classic, both avant-garde and accessible, and one of the biggest ever cross-over hits of the genre, with tracks from each disc spending some time occupying the number one spot of the billlboard charts.

13) Jaylib “Champion Sound”

Jaylib was the moniker of rapper/producer duo Jaydee (a.k.a. J Dilla) and Madlib, two of the most virtuosic and prolific beat makers in hip-hop by the time they collaborated on “Champion Sound”. Jaydee had made his name coming up out of Detroit with fellow motor city crew Slum Village and rising through the ranks of hip-hop royalty with extraordinary production work for the likes of A Tribe Called Quest, the Roots and Busta Rhymes; Madlib practically served as inhouse producer for innovative record label Stones Throw, and had already been granted unprecedented access to the vaults of legendary jazz label Blue Note for his remix project “Shades of Blue”. Their creative bonafides and status as underground legends were well established; if the two set out to prove anything here, it’s that coming from the “underground” needn’t mean they couldn’t make music just as gritty and trunk rattling as any of their mainstream peers. They prove so ably, with tracks full of throbbing bass, raw samples popping with vinyl hiss, drums clipping into the red, and blunt, hard-edged rhyming. The formula is simple; Dilla raps over Madlib’s beats, and vice versa, with minimal guest spots. Neither is an especially thrilling MC, but even with workman like lyrics the sheer sonic force, inventiveness, and urgency of the whole makes it essential.

14) Madvillain “Madvillainy”

The ever industrious Madlib followed the Jaylib project with a collaboration with another hip-hop legend, masked MC MF DOOM. The result is an exquisitely blunted bizarro hip-hop gem, and an immediate, ingenious underground classic. The two artist’s styles prove remarkably simpatico; DOOM’s mellow, rasping voice drapes itself flawlessly into Madlib’s chaotic yet meticuously controlled, tactile beats. The music is both fractured and soulful, shuffling polyrhythms somehow coalescing into deep pocket grooves and shimmering through a dense brain cloud of ganja smoke. DOOM brings his usual linguistic mad science to the proceedings, spinning deliriously from surreal, impressionistic free-form raps (“Meatgrinder”) to tangent’s about the hypocrisy of America’s militant relationship to the middle east (“Strange Ways”), to hilarious tales of romantic high-school rivalry (“Fancy Clown”). His straight-faced delivery belies an unassuming yet unparalleled lyrical intellect, with hooks virtually non-existent and tracks flitting by, often under the two minute mark, leaving a trail of wonderfully quotable jewels and earthy, ethereal beats in their wake. This is a record bursting at it’s seems with ideas, which remains extremely cohesive through it’s own brilliantly lunatic inner logic. Madlib and MF DOOM seem to mindmeld on to some blissful, esoteric frequency, broadcasting from the mysterious uncharted depths of LA.

15) Danger Mouse/Jay-Z “The Grey Album”

Dangermouse was a relatively unknown producer when he constructed “The Grey Album”, a mash-up comprised of acapellas from Jay-Z’s “Black Album” and samples flipped from the Beatles “White Album”. Rather than try to square the two rather incongruous musical elements, Dangermouse conjures something entirely unique from the combination; in places the heavy club beats that scored the original Jay-Z vocals are supplanted with melancholic, plucked guitars and airy vocal samples, in others fragments of distorted guitar from the eponymous Beatles album are isolated and brought to the forefront in thick, crunching loops. As a full album length experiment it stretches thin at points, but the strongest moments are impressively organic. It’s also the album that heralded the era of the mash-up and the mixtape, where music springs from the international waters of the internet, copyright laws are irrelevant and the best business is delivering music to the listener for free.

16) Kanye West “The College Dropout”

Revisiting the album which introduced the world to the rapper/producer soon to be the one of the hugest and most self-aggrandizing pop stars on the planet, the most immediately striking element is how modest a record it is; this is not to say it’s not ambitious and inventive, and the production is excellent throughout. But where each subsequent Kanye album grew more orchestral and bombastic, the production of “The College Dropout” is markedly more subdued, less expansive and much more grounded; the beats herein consist of soulful and accelerated vocal samples, rubbery bass lines, gospel piano and occasional stabs of brassy horns. There’s plenty of bragadaccio here, but mostly West assumes the posture of a pugnacious underdog; rapping about locking himself in his bedroom making five beats a day, trying to climb out of working soul depleting minimum wage jobs where he lifts cash from the register to supplement his minimum wage paychecks. These days, to see cameos from Jay-Z and Ludacris on the same album as Common and Talib Kweli may seem pro forma, but when West brought them together for his scrappy, self-assured debut in 2004 it was a fairly bold step forward, and a breath of fresh air in mainstream hip-hop.

17) De La Soul “The Grind Date”

The post 2000 era of hip-hop was a time where early innovators of the relatively new genre became musical veterans and icons of the culture. The question naturally emerged of how would those of the old garde still creating music redefine themselves as elder statesmen in what had begun as a more or less exclusively youthful movement; De La Soul, one of the most ground breaking groups of the late 80s-early 90s golden age, had begun to seem like they might end up by the way side. After a pair of creatively disappointing releases in the early aughts they roared back to life with the sadly under looked album “The Grind Date”, a record full of shimmering, soulful production and lean, potent lyricism. Rapper Posdnous addresses their status as hip-hop patriarchs on the closing track “Rock Co. Kane Flow”, a banging collabo with fellow old school survivor MF DOOM, sagely proselitizing ”everyone cools off from being hot/ it’s about if you can handle being cold or not”. The rest of the album, however, is devoid of any ponderous claims about De La’s historical relevance; it’s merely a focused, solid set of fresh, inspired hip-hop, beats provided by legends like J Dilla, Madlib, 9th Wonder, and a then unknown Jake One, cameo’s limited to other such rap forefathers as Ghostface, Common and Flava Flav.

18) MF DOOM “Mm, Food”

     MF DOOM had well established his villainous persona by the time he released his second album under the MF handle ; he was the beer swilling, metal mask donning rapper/producer with the most encyclopedic knowledge of obscure pop culture ephemera, a blunt-scarred, deadpan flow channeling some of the most magnificently bizarre internal rhyme schemes and lyrical cyphers ever unleashed on a beat. On this, his concept album about, yes, food, he seems so self assured that he never bothers to call out, or insinuate, any one name or outfit when slinging a dis rhyme; this is the the villain versus the whole damn rap game. DOOM also handles all the production on the album minus one Madlib track, sticking to the lustrous and percussive 80s R&B grooves that propelled his debut album. Despite his comic book inspired persona and the culinary conceit that serves as the framework for the album, it’s never forced or gimmicky, just masterfully composed bars of free flowing, stream of consciousness lyricism. It’s also fiercely original from top to bottom, including a  four track long instrumental segue thrown into the middle of the album seemingly just for the hell of it, or perhaps to remind that there still remains space for innovation in the structural DNA of a hip-hop album.

19) J Dilla “Donuts”

For an album of 32 instrumental tracks, almost all of which drift by in less than two minutes, “Donuts” is a shockingly satisfying and cohesive record. This epic suite would also prove to be Detroit producer J Dilla’s swan song; he recorded it while in the final stages of a  battle with lupus, some of it completed on a lap top and portable turntable in his hospital deathbed, and it dropped just three days before his passing. Dilla was notoriously industrious, and left behind unknown hours of beat tapes; while “Donuts”, expansive as it is, inevitably has some of the rag-tag, kitchen sink elements of his other tossed together instrumental collections, it maintains a celebratory yet melancholic essence that flows and weaves throughout it’s entirety. As a final testament from one of the most brilliant, inventive, and influential hip-hop musicians of all time, and for the vibrant and strikingly beautiful texture of it’s whole, “Donuts” is an essential hip-hop album in spite of and because of it’s scatter shot and overly imaginative spirit.

20) Ghostface Killah ”Fish Scale”

     Ghostface comes out of the gates swinging on “Fishscale”; it’s an album full of hypnotic, kaleidoscopic beats, and Ghost’s most hungry and forcefully brilliant rapping since previous career water mark “Supreme Clientele”. No attempt is made here to alter the  formula; this is, in the man’s own words, a “ghetto street opera”, songs balanced between gritty urban blaxploitation narratives and Ghostface’s signature unhinged hip-hop surrealism. All of this plus a slew of well placed and equally focused guest verses from each of his Wu-Tang associates make for a refined hip-hop classic, appropriately analogized by the slang for purely distilled cocaine that serves as the albums title. 

21) Spank Rock “Yoyoyoyoyoyo”

Spank Rock’s debut album was a profoundly filthy discharge from the world of Baltimore club rap; this is music singularly obsessed with the prurient enchantment of B-more strip clubs and after hours bounce parties. It’s also an ingenious salvo of avant-garde hip-hop; tracks unfold in non-linear blasts of ricocheting beats, plucked strings, 808 snaps and arrhythmic 8-bit video game sonics. Despite his myopic attachment to the vulgar subject matter of strippers and profligate sex, Spank Rock is a dexterous and charismatic MC who elevates his material from profane to tongue-in-cheek sublime, creating a party rap album which is at once a richly rewarding, sonically compelling sweaty club record, and incomparable to any other hip-hop album of any era past or, most likely, future.

22) The Roots “Game Theory”

     The Roots are beyond question one of the most powerful forces to exist in hip-hop today, and while the odds on favorite for their best album of the last decade is probably “Phrenology”, I’d place my money on this dark gem. One of the Roots’ strengths has always been their willingness for fearless, genre-defying experimentation, but “Game Theory” is instead a bracingly tight, cohesive hip-hop record, if a moody and challenging one. A melancholic, occasionally disconsolate atmosphere pervades the album, but tempered with enough moments of rich and soulful production to keep alight a brilliant spark of radiance in the darkness. Lyrically it adheres to themes of poverty, political corruption, and media distortion; it’s essentially an album length meditation on coming up with nothing in the ghettos of South Philly, but the warm, string laden backdrop to album highlight “Long Time” brings a poignant triumphalism to the tale of coming out the other side of a struggle with inner city poverty. On the whole, “Game Theory” posseses it’s own fractured beauty, down trodden but never defeated.

23) Clipse “Hell Hath No Fury”

     Brothers Malice and Pusha-T play the part of two steely, cold hearted criminals with occasional glimmers of conscience; they rap almost entirely about the mechanics of cooking and selling crack, unapologetic yet with humane moments of contrition amongst the boasts of opulence and designer jewels. This is hardly brave new territory for rappers, but the two trade in pithy barbs and one-liners; the combination of sly wit and nihilistic trap rap possesses it’s own morbid allure. But where the brothers Scarface shtick ends is where the Neptunes come in; they handle all of the production on the album, and not a moment is squandered. Musically, “Hell Hath No Fury” is a muscular, ruthless record, beats coiled tight and queasily unstable all at once. Drums snap with militant precision while dissonant synth squeals lay atop metronomic bass lines; elsewhere James Brown yelps punctuate chromatically ascending harp trills. It’s menacingly controlled while nauseously spiraling into a moral abyss.

 24) I Self Devine “Self Destruction”

I Self Devine cut his teeth in the Minneapolis by way of LA/Atlanta group the Micranots, though he has mostly toiled in the shadows of his more publicly visible Rhymesayers brethren. This is unfortunate, as he is a forceful and intelligent lyricist with an angular and urgent flow distinctly his own. While he focuses on thrust over flash, his rhymes are nimbly constructed, blunt on their face with cryptic and elliptical inner meanings. His first and only solo album to date is full of prismatic, radiant beats provided by a host of underground producers, including Seattle’s Jake One and Minneapolis’ own Ant, of fellow RSE artists Atmosphere. With any luck “Self Destruction” will one day be acknowledged as the over looked classic of Midwest hip-hop that it is, but either way it remains an unsung, exquisite gem.

25) Kanye West “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy”

     Kanye West is an obnoxious public figure, to phrase it generously. In a media landscape over saturated with attention mongering egotists, West has carved out a niche uniquely his own, staging a seeming constant stream of petulant and very public meltdowns. He has transformed himself into the sad tortured id of contemporary celebrity culture, and a deeply unsympathetic character. All the more confounding, then, that with all the toxic associations Kanye West, tabloid figure/pop culture douche bag, has cultivated, I believe reverently that this, his most recent solo album, is something approaching a mainstream masterpiece. Whereas West’s previous records have been increasingly ambitious, high concept pop albums, “My Beautiful, Dark, Twisted Fantasy” is an entirely different monster; an uncompromisingly dense, expansive and yet claustrophobic miasma of maximalist hip-hop orchestration. A controlling, paranoid atmosphere pervades the album. Though it seems at times, deceptively, to come off it’s own rails, this is unmistakably the work of a musician meticulously in command of the sprawling and chaotic beast he is coaxing into being. Even as it veers from dark yet gleeful hip hop braggadacio (“Power”, “Monster”), to icy, tightly coiled moments of personal anguish (“Runaway”, “Blame Game”), it retains an intensely focused, schizophrenic command of it’s own relentlessly ambitious and, I daresay, yet uncharted landscape.