Top Albums of The Decade #1

I’ve been working on this list for about two weeks now, and about a week before that deciding which records I should include in the first place. I’ve got about forty albums in an Excel sheet but am finding it a daunting task having to write about them all. So instead of trying to come up with one mega-post I’ve decided to split the list into bite-size chunks by posting a mini-essay on one album at a time. It’s going to be in random arbitrary order but hopefully that would impel me to continue writing instead of looking at the list in discouragement and going, “Aarggh is anyone even going to read this?!”

More than half of the list is made up of albums released in just the first two years of the past decade. Maybe those two years were really that great. Maybe it’s just a case of the albums having had more time than the rest to really sink in. Or perhaps it’s a combination of all that and being a guy in his early twenties discovering a ton of new music for the first time.

So anyway here’s the first one.


Jay-Z – The Blueprint (2001)

The late 90′s and early 2000′s saw hip-hop retreating underground as a reaction to the commercial dominance of labels like Bad Boy, No Limit and Cash Money. It was also a time of Hype Williams videos (read: saturated colours, fish eye lenses), MTV Cribs and mostly keyboard-driven productions from people like Timbaland and an up-and-coming Neptunes.

The Blueprint switched things up and re-established record sampling as a core feature of hip-hop. What set it apart stylistically was the introduction of sped-up, chipmunk-ed sampling of old soul records popularised by Kanye West and Just Blaze who, in contrast to producers like DJ Premier who went to great lengths to obscure the original records, made no qualms about wholesale usage of their source material. The more recognisable the better.

It also helped that the album was released at the height of Jay-Z’s high profile feud with Nas and Mobb Deep. Jay pretty much owned Nas with ‘Takeover’ (“Four albums in ten years nigga? I can divide / That’s one every let’s say two, two of them shits was due / One was – nah, the other was Illmatic / That’s one hot album every ten year average”). Fortunately both of them didn’t go down the Biggie/2Pac route.

The Blueprint would go on to serve as a launch pad for Kanye’s career and made hip-hop feuds a necessary promotional tool for record labels. More importantly, the album made it OK to like mainstream rap again.

Music | February 2nd, 2010

2 Responses to “Top Albums of The Decade #1”

  1. kulen Says:
    February 3rd, 2010 at 4:28 am

    Is this what you do in the office?

    I know I have this album but hey you might want to consider adding a link to the whole album download. It’ll be much awesome to have a listening station to each songs too. But yeah thats gonna be alot of work……

  2. shtikman Says:
    February 3rd, 2010 at 11:43 am

    I write all this mostly at home, but if I have the time yeah I squeeze in bits and pieces while at work.

    And no, I won’t be posting any download links, especially not on a domain that I registered under my own name. Unless they’re legitimate sites of course.

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