There is ruin, and a cloud of silence-more about a confirmation of what has happened than a signaling of what is coming. The calm after the storm is the one that is eerie. To talk about the calm which comes after a turbulent moment makes for a less romantic cliche.

We do this for our culture.For anyone who has been through a vicious cycle of weather, it is known that there is a calm directly after the storm, too. Hit the jump and take a journey through hip-hop’s most vibrant decade. The classics you’ve played every day since elementary school, to the records you forgot existed, and maybe an album or two you didn’t even know about-all compiled in one place.

With that in mind, we’ve ranked the Best Rap Albums of the 90s. At the time, your musical menu most likely depended on what part of the country you lived in. But with the benefit of hindsight, and the Internet, it’s now possible to survey the cream of the crop and make informed decisions about which records are good, better, and best. There was so much great music being made in so many different places and spaces that it’s far too easy for great things to get overlooked. They’re works that set the tone for the future of hip-hop, secured their legacies, and made us realize beyond a reasonable doubt that the genre was already taking over the world just as quickly as it took over our music libraries.Īll rap fans know these classics, but they’re only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to 90s hip-hop. They’re records you know front to back, even if some of them outdate you. And in the process, these men and women created classics. Tupac, 3 Stacks, Lauryn, Jay, Biggie visionaries who took an art form just over a decade removed from its infancy and gave it the attention it needed to develop into adulthood, where it now stands three decades later as the most-consumed genre of music in the U.S. The storytellers of the ’90s were, and will always be, some of the greatest to touch a microphone. This feature was originally published in 2014.

Scarface the diary 1994