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

no matter how far we drill the poll down i think ilm will be ilm

These results seem spot on to me (at least until Guru's Jazzmatazz).

Didn't know Buhloone Mindstate had such a high standing---it always seemed like the De La Soul album casual fans couldn't name---but I do love it. I'd rank it above Midnight Marauders, probably.

yeah but there are a lot of not-just-casual de la fans here

top two are both super dope gj ilx

where are the 17 ilxors who listened to black sunday?

Yo-Yo - You Better Ask Somebody 1

who was this...? even I don't think this record is that good

Missed this one, but mad props to the three who voted for the Jungle Brothers' third!

that Erick Sermon has a dope verse from Keith Murray

is there any album besides The Chronic that's widely loved enough to be worth considering excluding from a '92 poll? Pharcyde, Pete Rock, Gang Starr?

some dude deej and whiney should have their own board where only they are allowed to vote in rap polls. board should also be invisible to everybody but the three qualified posters

Ah. Their own circle of hell, you mean.

Guru - Jazzmatazz Volume 1 2

we need to stop letting europeans vote in rap polls

― jjjdoom (Whiney G. Weingarten), Monday, August 27, 2012 8:04 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah that gravediggaz victory was unacceptable

― some dude, Monday, August 27, 2012 10:43 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark

aero you realize i was mocking whiney w/ this, not cosigning, right

"we need to stop letting europeans vote in rap polls" is hilarious

Given the De La blowout here, I wouldn't be surprised if Pharcyde actually beat The Chronic in a 92 poll

I don't really like the Chronic tbh

Given the De La blowout here, I wouldn't be surprised if Pharcyde actually beat The Chronic in a 92 poll

― Evan R, Thursday, August 30, 2012 12:30 PM Bookmark

gross

I don't really like the Chronic tbh

― chicago rap twitter luminary (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, August 30, 2012 2:32 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

cmon son

I think I've explained this before.

I do like Doggystyle

like I get the Chronic's importance in the genre, I've heard it/know all the singles, I understand why it's such a big deal ... but youthful prejudices meant I didn't buy into it at the time, and when I've gone back to it it's just struck me as one of my least-favorite Dre productions sonically. I love all the NWA stuff up to Evilf4zaggin (which is nigh unlistenable) and a lot of his post-Chronic work (Doggystyle, loads of singles) but yeah it missed me at the time and I can't bring myself retroactively to care about it. I wouldn't vote for it in a poll from that year. The Chronic and Ready to Die were like a one-two punch that knocked me out of caring about chart rap for maybe a decade or so (maybe less, I came back around for the Timbo/Missy/'Kast era)

"Evilf4zaggin (which is nigh unlistenable)"

cmon son

"The Chronic and Ready to Die were like a one-two punch that knocked me out of caring about chart rap for maybe a decade"

0_0

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.