The story told by this group of 100 albums is one of a genre propelled from one side by leaps in technology and forced, on the other, to find ingenious workarounds for physical, sociopolitical, and legal barriers. It’s one of the quintessential American creations, so it only makes sense that it would be beset by quintessentially American evils. But in the end, it reflects the sincere love, awe, and excitement for all the rap that has entered our lives. After all, things go in cycles. –Paul A. Thompson
(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)
100.
Snoop Dogg: Doggystyle (1993)
It’s funny that Doggystyle begins with a skit of Snoop splish-splashing around in a bathtub—and then the first actual rap you hear comes from Lady of Rage. The figure who does eventually emerge, though, is fully rendered: at turns lackadaisical and razor-toothed, a carefree stoner who was recently out on bail for a murder case. Like The Chronic before it, Doggystyle was built by Dr. Dre and Daz Dillinger on the foundation laid by George Clinton and Parliament/Funkadelic. But it was Doggystyle where Dre perfected this cauldron of multi-layered synths, female background vocals, and deep, blown-out bass that solidified West Coast hip-hop’s mainstream dominance in the 1990s—and where Snoop became the slickest man at any party, the smoothest over any flip from your parents’ crates. –Donald Morrison
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
99.
Duwap Kaine: Underdog (2018)
No one exemplifies the bootstrapped genius of the SoundCloud era like Duwap Kaine, who started making rap songs as a literal child and had his first underground hit when he was barely a teenager. The kid from Savannah, Georgia, tweaked out the style of off-the-cuff home recording popular during this time, bending it to his whims and finding inspiration and novelty through the limitations of his setup. His 2018 album Underdog, released when he was 16, displays the best of this method: spacey, understated Fruity Loops beats from Nine9 paired with Duwap’s hypnotic punch-ins. He plays with Auto-Tune and cadences, revealing himself as a left-field kid who grew up on the internet, soaking up all the swag of innovators like Chief Keef and the late Goonew. He showed a generation that anyone can do it. –Millan Verma
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
98.
Foxy Brown: Broken Silence (2001)
There have been teen prodigies in rap, but not many like Foxy Brown, who, at 17, was tearing up Reasonable Doubt with her shrimp scampi–eating mafioso dreams and It Was Written with mathematics that have never been cracked. She had one of the smoothest flows out of Brooklyn from the jump—and, no, that’s not hyperbole. The words on the page came alive when they left her mouth. Broken Silence, her third album, dropped when she was 22, and Foxy was in full creative control, meshing together her pain, street-rap attitude, and West Indian roots like nobody else could. She personalizes the gloss and digital grime of early 2000s radio rap, wrapping all the drama and salacious tabloid headlines about her life into elegant shade and reckless flexing: “I don’t need to rob niggas/I pay niggas that rob niggas to rob niggas.” She maxes out her style and slipping in and out of patois with the effortless rhythm of Derek Jeter turning a double play. It’s a hip-hop travesty, albeit an unsurprising one, that she has not officially released another album since this Range-crashing, rap-dancehall heatrock. –Alphonse Pierre