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2004-01-15 - 11:38 a.m.

What a sparklingly beautiful snowfall that was!

And speaking of hip-hop, I was discussin' the genre with Tris. I mentioned to him that my only intimate knowledge of rap is Straight Outta Compton, which I quote from frequently and non-sequitorially when I don't know what else to say.

So I axed him if he would clue me in to the best, say, ten rap albums of all-time.

Here's what he had to say:

it's hard to say in 2004. when i was coming up, hip-hop was still a very regional industry, and one of great things about it was that every new record would quite literally comment on the other records that came before it. it was still small enough where you could do that. anyway, that gave you the feeling of being privy to a great ongoing discourse. *straight outta compton* came out at the tail end of that period -- as a matter of fact, it was the moment when we all realized that non-nyc voices were going to have to be included in the discussion. and that opened the floodgates.

it's not to say current rap albums aren't as good, necessarily, only that the genre has become way too big to give you that same feeling of community that you had when i was a kid.

it's hard to reconstruct from this vantage. we can look back now and access the kool moe dee-ll cool j battle as a historical curiosity, and judge it in its entirety, but it's not the same as getting the ll record in real time, and waiting at the record store for moe's response to come out. it was something that unfolded over weeks. you lived through it. there's nothing like that now in any genre.

a list of my favorite records would be too heavily weighted toward "the golden age", then, and we don't need another golden age list. beyond that, my taste corresponds to the white man paradigm of hip-hop listener (pretty much all rock critics' tastes do). i like Public Enemy, native tongues, heiro and project blowed, the intellectual records that some dismissive heads call "40 credit" rap. i *also* like southside, g-unit, master p and no limit, bad boy, but that's not the stuff that's really meaningful to me.

the one artist who is absolutely mandatory for any discussion of hip-hop is krs-one. in some ways, the entire genre since '86 can be seen as attempts to respond to questions posed by krs and boogie down productions. *criminal minded* is a stone classic -- it's the album that started g-rap -- but *by all means necessary* and *edutainment* are also pretty unimpeachable. i do think that krs's writing is probably best taken as a whole, but he's got the kind of personality that's indelible.

de la soul is my model group in that they were constantly attempting to engage outwardly with any community you put them in but were always intellectual outsiders who refused to be ostracized. they were also early believers in wild experimentation, and their lyricism has never been in doubt. *de la soul is dead* is probably my favorite album in any genre: their operatic and hallucinatory amityville and its semi-imaginary institutions (the donut hole, wrms, the roller-skating rink, the bk lounge) is made amazingly vivid. they're also the high kings of irony and self-reflexivity, a fact that is only reinforced by the flips and singles and extended mixes where characters from the records reappear in different contexts.

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