Rolling Stone's Hip-Hop albums list
 

What are your opinions on Rolling Stone magazine's placement of hip-hop albums in their "500 greatest albums" list (2003)

The list:

497 - Public Enemy - Yo Bum Rush The Show (1987)
483 - Notorious B.I.G. - Life After Death (1997)
478 - LL Cool J - Radio (1985)
477 - The Fugees - The Score (1996)
464 - Jay-Z - The Blueprint (2001)
459 - EPMD - Strictly Business (1988)
444 - Boogie Down Productions - Criminal Minded (1987)
400 - Nas - Illmatic (1994)
386 - Wu-Tang Clan - Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) (1993)
359 - Outkast - Stankonia (2000)
346 - De La Soul - 3 Feet High and Rising (1989)
317 - Eminem - The Eminem Show (2002)
312 - Lauryn Hill - The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998)
302 - Eminem - Marshall Mathers LP (2000)
300 - Public Enemy - Fear of a Black Planet (1990)
273 - Eminem - The Slim Shady LP (1999)
248 - Jay-Z - Reasonable Doubt (1996)
240 - Run-D.M.C. - Run-D.M.C. (1984)
227 - Eric B. & Rakim - Paid In Full (1987)
217 - Beastie Boys - Licensed to Ill (1986)
156 - Beastie Boys - Paul's Boutique (1989)
154 - A Tribe Called Quest - The Low End Theory (1991)
144 - N.W.A. - Straight Outta Compton (1988)
137 - Dr. Dre - The Chronic (1992)
133 - Notorious B.I.G. - Ready to Die (1994)
120 - Run-D.M.C. - Raising Hell (1986)
48 - Public Enemy - It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988)


Personally I think they really downplayed hip-hop's importance as a genre, I know the list was done back in 2003, but even so.
Also a lot of their additions and placements are questionable, I think most hip-hop fans would disagree with quite a bit of it.

Personally, Ready to Die is way too high, Life After Death shouldn't be on there, Illmatic is too low, Low End Theory too low, all of Jay-Z's albums too high, all of Eminem's albums too high, Paul's Boutique ridiculously high, 36 Chambers way too low, no inclusion of Endtroducing, Deltron 3030, Midnight Marauders, Bizarre Ride II, Illadelph Halflife, Liquid Swords, Black on Both Sides... all of these albums were released a good few years before the list was made.

Madvillian, seriously....

Personally, i try to not get to emotionally invested in rolling stone for fear of suicide. They're reviews are the same quality as usweekly or some bs.

Did you not see the date of the list? 2003

I'm most surprised that not a single 2Pac album made the list. Seemed like an artist that at least RS would recognize.

Oh and Im pretty sure Outkast's Aquemini made the list too.

Oh your right, totally missed that.

Could use some Big L then.

Have there been that many great, high-profile hip-hop albums released in the the past 30 or so years? Sadly, the answer to that is, no.
Hip hop has always largely been geared toward the marketing of singles and not albums. This isn't to say that there have not been some amazing hip-hop albums.

Does the sparseness of Hip-Hop albums on Rolling Stone's list of top 500 albums downplay Hip-hop's influence on music as a whole? No, not really. Hip-hop has pretty much influenced hip-hop, with some exceptions, but nothing noteworthy, and hey, rock and roll and its derivatives (soul, R&B, Heavy metal, etc.) had a 30 year head start, so naturally there's gonna' be a lot more albums from rock and associated sub-genre's than from hip-hop.

I'm actually quite quite, umm... not surprised by all of this. First of all, this list is subjective to a certain degree, as are your tastes to a greater degree, so the ranking of certain albums on the list is somewhat arbitrary.
Secondly, like Matious said, it's ****ing Rolling Stone, and if any of us on here really placed any serious weight on what they've tried to dictate as being good, classic, essential, etc. We'd have bled to death in our bathtubs a thousand times over.
If I had to be incredulous about anything, it would be the lack of the founding fathers. Where's Afrika Bambataa, Melly Mel and the Furious Five, Eric B and Rakim. ****, where the hell is Sugar Hill Gang!

There's a lot missing, but the moral of the story is: **** Rolling Stone.

I agree with this part but Paid in Full made it onto the list though

Edit: Actually looking over the list they did put most of the influential Old School artists on there.
Some are a bit lower than they should be though, why is EMPD and Boogie down productions near the bottom of the list?

Whoops.

Have you seen the rest of the list though? It's probably 400 rock albums, 100 albums from every other musical genre. Not to mention probably 15 of the top 20 albums are from the 60s. They know their audience and including more then 20 hip-hop albums (enough to make them look diverse and informed on hip music styles) was unnecessary.

My biggest complain is how difficult it is to browse through their list and slowass website.

yeah the layout for it really sucks

This was my point exactly.

And they did include artists such as Boogie Down Productions, EPMD and Eric B. & Rakim.

i don't fucking read the Ruling Stoned

i am not surprised if the No. 1 spot goes to a Bruce Springsteen album

if I were the editor of the Stoned, the Marshall Mathers LP would be at No. 1

Has there been a poll to see what the favourite hip-hop album on this forum is, like we did with artists (Wu-Tang)

If not, it'd be pretty nice to do one, and what would be the best way of going about it?

We could probably do a similar set up like the last one. The discussions for why people pick certain albums over others should be interesting.

How was that done? I wasn't really posting much around the time that was done.

Well it started out with a thread so that people could post what albums they thought would be good nominations and then it went into this process of collecting all of that information and randomly putting them together into groups of 5 to be voted on

it'd make more sense for the end result to be a top 10 or 20 list rather than one favourite I think for albums.

well a top 10 list can be made by the time all the voting is said and done.

or instead of going all the way to find out the one favorite tournament style like for the artists/group.

we could stop at top 10.

Well, just do a poll of the top 10 to find out their ordering.

alternatively, we could do a top 5 or 10 of the 80's, 90's and 00's.

how are we going to decide the top 10 though? there has to be a lenghty voting process to get down to the top 10

yes and based off of the success of MB's top 10 hip hop albums we could do another one where it narrows down to specific decades.

well as you said, stop when we get to 10... then stick those 10 in a poll to work out the ordering?

hmmm yeah we could do that or something else. Let me think about it for a bit.

Once you get it down to the top 10, each person could rank the albums in order from 1 to 10, 1 being the best, like a points system. The album with the least number of points would therefore be the #1 album and the one with the most #10.