best 1993 rap album besides Doggystyle, Midnight Marauders and 36 Chambers

speaking of the bay, why is Body Hat Syndrome not on this fuckin list yo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2HQ7dkJfeo

gee oh well

187 He Wrote is an unbelievably good record. And surprisingly it had a brief stint at #1 on the Billboard Hip-Hop/R&B charts. The relentless murder show lyrics get exhausting, but you can always zone out to the dope production.

Ship: Don't forget he did the Westside Connection album in that timespan tho. Doesn't really invalidate what you're saying, but worth noting.

I'm kind of surprising myself here by voting for KRS. Could just as easily have gone for Black Moon or Pac.

well my last post said "even taking into account soundtracks and the Westside Connection album"

oops, I kind of skimmed the thread at a certain point

that Westside Connection album sucks tho

LL in 93 is an hilarious cultural document

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFvqfCWU__4

Akinyele - Vagina Diner
Tha Alkaholiks - 21 & Over
De La Soul - Buhloone Mindstate
Mac Dre - Young Black Brotha: The Album
Mac Mall - Illegal Business?
Masta Ace - Slaughtahouse
MC Breed - The New Breed
Naughty By Nature - 19 Naughty III
Scarface - The World Is Yours
Spice 1 - 187 He Wrote
Too $hort - Get in Where Ya Fit in

My top ten, probably gonna vote for Too $hort. Ive played that record so many times & "just another day" is an easy top 5 all time rap song for me

mac dre
mac mall
mac ace
mac breed
mac nature
scarmac
mac 1
too mac

have not heard 21 & Over but thanks to this thread I will.

dont front on mac mall
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UTpuikhMGU

this was hard too.

i think i'm voting 21 and over. it is p much the template of a fun ass rap record.

Torn between De La and Souls of Mischief; opted for how I chilled in '93 ('til ?)

also got the best use of 7 minutes of funk

intoxicated demons ep is missing, honestly that would be easily in my top ten if it was here

voted Buhloone ahead of J.Beez

weird q to me. he's a musician! he likes to make music! he's a writer, he likes to write!

nah I'm with Shakey, it was apparent that he didn't like to make music or write anymore at that point. He had been the best songwriter in the world from the age of about 16 to 21, then Lethal Injection sucked and indicated that he was best off walking away, good on him for doing so.

Westside Connection interviews meantime very very clearly indicated he had no interest in smart songwriting anymore

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Black Moon - Enta Da Stage
Cypress Hill - Black Sunday
Jungle Brothers - JBeez With The Remedy

this is a toss-up for me but i'll probably vote cypress hill

brand nubian, the coup, onyx and souls of mischief also get dap

Voted for Jungle Brothers, mainly because how much I love this song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stEscLBXQiA

Souls of Mischief, Black Moon and Digable Plantes would be up there too.

my top 5 ended up being Scarface > Black Moon > 2Pac > JBeez > De La

not too concerned about digable planets because "blowout comb" is *so* much better

and you're cool like dat *biddy biddy bop*funky funky*

srsly surprised at how nobody's said anything about "black sunday"

xp yes, that was the jam

2 I Ain't Goin' Out Like That
3 Insane In The Brain 3:29
4 When The Sh-- Goes Down 3:09
6 Cock The Hammer 4:25
9 Legalize It 0:47
10 Hits From The Bong 2:41
11 What Go Around Come Around, Kid 3:42
12 A To The K 3:28
13 Hand On The Glock 3:33
14 Break 'Em Off Some

i can only imagine people get annoyed by sen dog on chorus otherwise should sweep the poll

it's like ... iconic or something? the way doggy style is? you don't hear cypress hill tracks in clubs but i don't know anybody in high school who listened to black sunday less than doggystyle or 36 chambers (certainly not more than those, but how could you be in high school in 93 and not have a black sunday tape in your car?)

how could you be in high school and own a car?!

Cypress Hill were definitely HUGE at the time in a way that is not really remembered now

sen dog is the best anyone whos mad at him is insane in the membrane

welcome to the 1% sic

oh wait there was one girl in my year whose daddy bought her a car for her 18th

fwiw me n my friends vibed to the first cypress hill in cars but not really black sunday

fwiw sic in the usa its p common for hs students to have cars

what the fuck I'm rollin
in a truck that's stolen
guess what I'm holdin
ammo to bust my loooooaaaaaaad

yeah i don't know where you are sic but i imagine at least 1/4 of students older than 16 have cars in the US if not 1/3 or 1/2

the genius of cypress hill is glimpsed in the fact that their lyrics don't scan at all on paper as rhythmic but b real makes it sounds like the most obvious thing when he delivers it

once i realized that all 3 of Black Sunday's singles had choruses that were essential 'B-Real says title phrase, Sen Dog repeats it' the bloom kinda came off the rose. "I Ain't Goin' Out Like That" is still a joint, though.

high school wasn't that long ago for me - and i prob lived in a pretty representative lower-middle/middle class suburb growing up - at least half of us had cars. USED cars, but cars

xp

yeah yeah all rap songs sound the same, i know

dj muggs production is incredible, iirc the rza was pretty geeked on it

yeah i think the thing is your parents buy cars, and then when you're sixteen they buy themselves a newer car and give you the beat-up one

thx planet earth, usa needs more oil

i mean every track on black sunday has sen dog repeating b-real at least once or twice not counting the choruses, but for whatever reason i can hang with it

car r cool for listening to raps in

rap is invented for listening to in cars! the cars that go boom!

he brings the absurdity w/o which they sunk into a gloomy pit of stoner boringness on later albums (though he was still there, so not sure where the absurdity went)

he = sen dog on black sunday, he's hilarious

I can make you famous like Amos
Same as the last punk, when I stuck the gatt up his anus
Hear me growl: Grrra! Howl!
I got the night vision just like the wise old owl

GRAA! HOWL!!

oh don't get me wrong i love sen dog

unpopular opinions about rap I have held

totally agree w/you on Chronic

chronically ilx

tbf I don't expect anybody to agree with me really. anyone younger than me is likely to have grown up with Dre/Biggie/Jay-Z/Puffy dominating the radio landscape for a huge chunk of time and that stuff was instantly canonized due to its commercial impact, there's kind of no arguing with it. I'm just explaining my personal preferences which were informed more by the previous era. and like I said I did come back around to chart rap once the east-west bullshit faded and the south became the big locus of hitmaking activity.

fyi people never respond never well to "you like it because it's canon." you wouldn't if it was directed at you.

I wasn't thinking of it strictly as a canon thing, I think it's more of a "being really excited about music that was huge when you were young" thing. maybe there's some overlap there, I dunno. but I don't think people here who didn't grow up with the Chronic would go back to it and love it just because it's canon, I'm not trying to impugn anyone's motives, just explain my own.

like if I had been 16 when "Juicy" came out I probably would have loved it. but I was 16 when "Humpty Dance" came out.

Missed this. Would have voted Black Moon.

It's okay, Shakes: The Chronic missed me then and does little now. Not because it's canon though.

i hope people do realize that these polls do not presume that everyone likes Ready To Die or Midnight Marauders better than all of the available options. it's just a device for having conversations about different favorites.

I guess what I'm getting at in a roundabout way is that there was a very dramatic and self-evident shift in hip-hop from '93 on and I didn't like it at the time and have never really changed my mind about it. If you didn't experience that shift you probably don't give a fuck about it. But I can't grow new positive associations with a lot of stuff from this era, it's all just a bummer to me, squandered promise, a depressingly wrong turn for the genre. There was still a lot of hip hop from the 90s that I loved and still love, but the stuff that dominated the charts for the most part leaves me cold.

xp

Shakey's opinion on 'ready to die' is most shocking to me, that'd be in my top five albums of all time.

lol I meant '92 there

xp

btw have we talked about Chris Lighty RIP anywhere yet? this might not be a bad spot

poor guy

I align almost 100% with Shakey on The Chronic and Ready To Die, though I've warmed more to the latter over the years. And Doggystyle >>>>>>>The Chronic is OTM. But "Deep Cover" is still the best Dre/Snoop song.

yeah I fux with Deep Cover

what do you dislike about hip hop in the nineties, Shakes? how did it betray the tradition?

oh c'mon there are lots of obvious (and often perfectly defensible) reasons for that

I'm asking Shakey though

betrayal is maybe a bit strong - it's more like hip hop's scope narrowed, in a couple different ways.

sonically hip hop moved away from being a structurally innovative amalgam of sampled material and other instrumentation to a much more streamlined, traditional songwriting format. samples were still used (and still are), but they moved increasingly to the background - they started to function more as a simple source for traditional hooks, or just as the skeleton that other instrumentation (synths and drum machines, primarily) would be structured around. Dre is totally a good example of this - if you look at how "We're All in the Same Gang" is built, with so many shifts and turnarounds and breaks crammed in there, and compare it to any number of songs where he just copped Atomic Dog for 3 and 1/2 minutes the difference is pretty striking. The former was like a totally different pop vocabulary - it didn't follow the songwriting structures that had developed around traditional live instrumentation (intro-verse-chorus-bridge etc), it was this whole new thing. But for legal and economic reasons, that kind of approach fell by the wayside and a lot of chart rap figured out "oh hey, it's easier to just make a song with a drumbeat and a keyboard, throw one 8-bar loop in for the hook = bang we're done"). And that is why I hate listening to Puffy bite the Police for 3 1/2 minutes lol the end.

The other thing, and this is also totally a cliche, is that the range of narrative voices shrank considerably. Prior to the Chronic/Doggystyle/Ready to Die labels were throwing anything at the wall to see what would stick - you had afrocentric black nationalists, goofy party raps, gangsters, posturing intellectuals, sex raps, boho stoners - it was just a really vibrant, diverse mix of personalities. but that narrowed as soon as huuuuuuge money and white suburban audiences became the focus. You still had weird stuff at the margins, but dudes chasing the money all went for gangster nihilism and it really became the dominant narrative strain, which persists to this day.

there are exceptions to all of these generalizations, of course, this is just what I saw as the trends at the time and in retrospect my evaluation hasn't changed much.