“What really matters is what you like, not what you are like.”
– Nick Hornby, High Fidelity (1995)
Readers who have enjoyed our interviews from time to time know that we typically ask artists to share their five favorite albums of all time at the end of our conversations with them. No matter who the artist is, it’s always fascinating to discover which long players have impacted their personal and professional lives. A few of our interview subjects have even scoffed at the standard five-album limit, rattling off upwards of a dozen or so titles and second-guessing if they’ve made the right choices.
And now, we’re excited to reveal our writers’ respective lists of their 25 all-time favorite albums. We all reserve the right to change our minds about these choices in the future, but for now, here are the indispensable albums that we can’t live without and the reasons why.
Explore Jesse Ducker’s 25 favorites below, click the “Next” button to browse the lists or return to the main index.
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Eric B. & Rakim
Paid in Full
4th & B’Way/Island (1987)
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Paid in Full helped give birth to modern hip-hop lyricism. Even with all the rhymes Rakim devoted to moving crowds and keeping the dance-floor packed, Paid in Full helped create the “beats and lyrics” approach to hip-hop music. Paid in Full was one of the first rap albums to feature creations not designed as singles or club hits, but to showcase lyricism for its own sake.
Boogie Down Productions
Criminal Minded
B-Boy (1987)
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Criminal Minded is hip-hop in its essence. It’s one of the essential templates that hip-hop albums are still built around. It’s groundbreaking in terms of both lyrical content and delivery, as well as production style. It’s an album that’s reverent to hip-hop’s old school history and pays tribute to its dancehall/reggae roots, but also an impressive early chapter in establishing the way that hip-hop’s “New School” changed how hip-hop was approached for years to come.
Burning Spear
Marcus Garvey
Island (1975)
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Few genres of music illuminate the juxtaposition of beauty and pain like Reggae. Its most prominent artists are like prophets, conveying detailed descriptions of abject poverty, steeped in spiritual imagery. These griots weave anthems of liberation, encouraging its audience to use both action and education as the means to attain freedom. Burning Spear’s Marcus Garvey is such an album. It motivates while creating some of the most exquisite and poetic compositions ever recorded.
On an aesthetic level, Marcus Garvey is a perfect album to chill out to. Cool and mellow vibes radiate from the music. The lyrics are understated, yet powerful, capturing the sentiments of sections of the population of Jamaica in the mid-1970s. The album is an ode to the philosophies of the nominal Garvey, and a call for an awakening, both spiritual and social, for the population of the island and Black people across the globe.
Cannibal Ox
The Cold Vein
Definitive Jux (2001)
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I’ve always been a big fan of artistic undertakings that create their own universes. I appreciate when an author or filmmaker can fashion a unique, fleshed-out world between what solely exists between the two covers of a book or within the confines of singular film. With The Cold Vein, The Cannibal Ox duo and producer El-P take listeners on a 70+ minute journey through the desolate streets, deserted alleyways, and smoke-filled hallways of pre-gentrified Harlem and other blighted areas of the Big Apple.
The album juxtaposes the lows and highs of trying to exist in NYC like few other albums. It describes the artery of pain that flows through the city, as well as the desperate hope of its denizens to find a way to transform into something that can rise above it all. It’s a self-contained piece of hip-hop perfection, standing on its own like the Catch-22 or Dark City of hip-hop.
Cymande
Cymande
Janus (1972)
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A beautiful, shimmering concoction of funk, reggae, soul, and other African-based music. Cymande’s self-titled debut radiates positivity and love, its contents sounding like concentrated liberation.
Cypress Hill
Cypress Hill
Ruffhouse/Columbia (1991)
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Cypress Hill exploded on the scene with their debut album, creating a unique brand of dusted, blunted, and raw hip-hop that shaped the ways the music was made for years to come. On the mic, the Los Angeles-based group was the perfect contrast of sound and tone. Perfect music for the stoned.
De La Soul
De La Soul Is Dead
Tommy Boy (1991)
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Few groups have been able to reinvent themselves, yet remain true to what made them unique like De La Soul did with De La Soul Is Dead. Disillusioned with the music industry, and annoyed at being pigeonholed, they went in a different, occasionally darker, direction. The album brims with creativity and is never afraid to take chances.
The D.O.C.
No One Can Do It Better
Ruthless/Atlantic (1989)
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The D.O.C.’s debut is an album about being great, and its content matches its aspirations. The Texas-born, L.A. based emcee gives one of the best lyrical performances in history, seeking to crack the code on what it takes to reach the pinnacle of emceeing. Musically, this is the best album that Dr. Dre has been involved with. He densely packs in samples, adding bridges and breakdowns. He also occasionally reimagines classic breaks and funk tracks with an in-house band.
Bob Dylan
Bringing It All Back Home
Columbia (1965)
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Bob Dylan is one of the rare artists who changed the course of contemporary music multiple times over his 60-year career. One of the first times he did so was with Bringing It All Back Home. The album bridges Dylan’s “man and guitar” folk hero persona to one of the greatest living poets. Some of the finest lyricism appears here, as he says more in less than two minutes and thirty seconds than most artists can say in double the time.
Edan
Beauty and the Beat
Lewis Recordings (2005)
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Beauty and the Beat bursts with creativity, imagination and intellect in a way few albums have before or since. With his sophomore release, Edan took his music to the next level in terms of scope and ambition. Like many of the best types of albums, it honors its influences while still being forward-thinking. It’s eclectic without being impenetrable. It’s erudite without being didactic. It’s like if some mad scientist cross-bred a Cold Crush Brothers bootleg cassette with a Lord Finesse album with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with a VHS copy of La Planete sauvage with Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
Ghostface Killah
Supreme Clientele
Epic/Razor Sharp (2000)
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Supreme Clientele surges with life, re-harnessing all of Ghostface Killah’s energy and detonating it with the force of a nuclear bomb. He flexes his unique slang and off-kilter, almost stream-of-consciousness rhymes to create a wild and weird listening experience, using his storytelling abilities to build an extreme hyper-reality. Meanwhile, the rest of his cohorts are in peak lyrical form, reminding listeners of exactly why the Wu-Tang Clan ruled hip-hop in the mid-’90s.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Axis: Bold As Love
Track (1967)
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Jimi Hendrix combined his divine guitar skills with remarkable songwriting ability to create a magnum opus of ’60s rock. It’s the best guitar-driven album all of time, with the virtuoso of virtuosos unlocking the instrument’s full potential in ways that are still hard to comprehend. Never has psychedelia sounded so soulful and sublime.
Ice Cube
AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted
Priority/Lench Mob (1990)
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The release of AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted is the first time I remember my musical dreams coming true. A collaboration between my favorite rapper at the time and my favorite group at the time (Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad production crew), it was pure hip-hop nirvana when I first copped it. The project married Ice Cube’s N.W.A-styled gangsta-isms with Public Enemy’s revolutionary stylings. It’s among the albums that I’ve listened to the most throughout my life.
KMD
Mr. Hood
Elektra (1991)
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Mr. Hood’s fun quirkiness of the album gives it its understated brilliance. In terms of content and approach, KMD falls somewhere in between De La Soul and Brand Nubian: they’re filled with youthful enthusiasm, but ready to kick strong rhetoric. The group, led by a pre-MF DOOM Zev Love X, switches lyrical and musical gears with ease, never sounding forced and always keeping their sense of humor.
Augustus Pablo
King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown
Yard International/Clocktower (1976)
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Dub is always an elusive, hard to define genre of music, but few mastered it like Osbourne Ruddock a.k.a. King Tubby. A master behind the mixing board and sound system manipulator, Tubby teams with renowned producer and musician Augustus Pablo, remixing known reggae tracks and giving them a whole new identity. Besides the impact it had on the dub genre, it influenced post-punk, goth, and damn near every form of electronic music going forward. If nothing else, this album managed to make the melodica cool.
Parliament
Mothership Connection
Casablanca (1975)
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It’s said that music can heal all wounds, and indeed Mothership Connection’s brand of feel-good funk soothes and removes the pain that this world inflicts upon us all. George Clinton and his band of funk warriors descend in the Mothership, resolved to make the world a better place by transforming the planet with great grooves. The album definitely puts a glide in your slide and a dip in your hip.
The Pharcyde
Bizarre Ride II The Pharcyde
Delicious Vinyl (1992)
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When they released their debut album, The Pharcyde were labeled “alternative hip-hop,” mostly because they were from Los Angeles and didn’t rhyme about shooting people. They represented the young people who smoked weed, tried to get laid, and wanted to have a good time. And as a result, they recorded music that reflected their desire to enjoy themselves as much as possible.
The Pharcyde are one of those special groups that managed to capture the essence of using hip-hop as a form of expression of joy. The music they created on their debut album sounded unlike much of the music that was being recorded and released at the time. It remains one of the most whimsical, hedonistic hip-hop albums ever.
Prince
Sign O’ the Times
Paisley Park/Warner Bros. (1987)
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A sprawling masterpiece, as the Purple One tries to do it all and succeeds. The purple genius threads the needle of recording music that could only be created by him, yet is pretty universal in its appeal. Rarely are endeavors that are as ambitious as this so rich, textured, and rewarding.
Public Enemy
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
Def Jam/Columbia (1988)
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This album changed the way that I viewed music. The pinnacle of music that aimed to “say something” that also builds a transcendent sonic experience. Though It Takes a Nation of Millions is the aural embodiment of the widespread rage generated towards this crooked government system over thirty-five years ago, its power resonates today.
Raekwon
Only Built 4 Cuban Linx…
Loud/RCA (1995)
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Raekwon’s debut is just as influential and revelatory as the first offering from his crew, the Wu-Tang Clan. Its depiction of ground-level street dealing and criminal escapades is fantastically detailed yet anchored in reality. Sure, rappers had rapped about slanging cocaine and crack before, but this project practically created a sub-genre. And in the nearly three decades since its release, none of its “children” have surpassed it.
Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… unfolds like one of the best late ’70s/early ’80s crime flicks never to be filmed. Its greatness was enough to transcend being a part of Wu-Tang’s continuing domination and has entered the pantheon of timeless hip-hop classics. It’s a flawless entry and its impact is still being felt as a blueprint on how to speak about criminal activity on record while sounding as fly as a motherfucker.
Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth
Mecca and the Soul Brother
Elektra (1992)
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One of hip-hop’s greatest musical partnerships, as Mecca and the Soul Brother remains the best pairing of beats and lyrics to appear on an album. Out of the thousands of releases that I have purchased and listened to over the last four decades, few mean as much to me as this one.
Run-DMC
Raising Hell
Profile/Arista (1986)
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Raising Hell was the prototype for the conception of the hip-hop album as an “album,” rather than just a collection of singles. Run, DMC, and Jam Master Jay all shine individually and feed off of each other to become one of hip-hop’s most well-oiled machines ever.
Sly & The Family Stone
Stand!
Epic (1969)
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The psychedelic rock/soul/funk group’s fourth album is an antidote to the deeply cynical times that we live in. The album’s absolute sincerity is refreshing, as are the sentiments that we can make the world a better place. Stand! is inspiring without being didactic, simplistic, or preachy.
A Tribe Called Quest
The Low End Theory
Jive (1991)
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Tribe’s sophomore album is the perfect soundtrack for enjoying the mellow moments in life, when you feel the clock pleasantly slowing to a crawl. The group took what they already did exceedingly well and raised the execution to a level reached by few others.
Ultramagnetic MCs
Critical Beatdown
Next Plateau (1988)
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There’s no doubt that Critical Beatdown could have only been released in the late 1980s. And yet, despite sounding like the product of its era, when it hit the shelves, both the long-player and Ultramagnetic MCs were very much ahead of their time. In terms of the styles, techniques, and rhyme schemes, Ced Gee and Kool Keith often sound like they are speaking in a different language than the rest of emcees on this planet.