I won't call this "wayback," but I am discussing 2000
As previously mentioned, I was reluctant to further my "wayback" series to cover the decade that we are currently in for reasons including the fact that we're still IN the decade and the fact that this decade has caused us to watch the slow and painful death of this artform that I have come to love down through my years.
A footnote to this is that I have not done the 80s yet either, but that has more to do with the fact that the decade was EXTRA thin on releases, and a lot of the release dates just can't fucking be found as easily as things released SINCE the advent of the internets... Go figure.
Anyway, I had a request or was asked if I would be doing this immediately upon having finished the 90s series by someone who apparently neglected to read that I specifically mentioned that I probably wouldn't.
More recently, though, I was specifically REQUESTED to scribe my "top 10 albums from 2000-present," and I arrived home from handling business yesterday with my mind on compiling that list, but situations worked contrary to my creative spirit and I couldn't do it...
Got to work today after having finished the business I conducted yesterday afternoon [if I knew at 15:40 what I would find out at 17:36, then I would have been at work on time today, but let's not go there] and STARTED to do a "top ten," but I was beginning to feel like I was writing for one of those list sites, and I am not being paid [much, damned adsense] for writing these, and I couldn't POSSIBLY stop at 10 albums over what is now a 9 year, 10.5 month period. Fuck, I would have had a HARD time choosing using simply the first 4 years of the decade.
All that said, I am going "wayback-ish" for these. See, most anyone reading this, regardless of age or pedigree, should remember the years presented in these. As far as the tags for the blog go, I will be marking these as "wayback" as I did the priors, but my opinion is not that they fully qualify yet.
Today, after all the lead-in, I will be starting with 2000.
Don't expect me to do these in order, I didn't last time either and you can't MAKE me unless you click on the tags with the years HAR-HAR!!!
I no longer have to qualify these years with what grade I was in, I was working and educating full time by the time these years came to be... I was 20 the first half of the year and 21 the second, and in both cases I am months past the last time I had a haircut or red meat, both things I have held onto even up to date.
The year is 2000 and we're full on ready to continue the STORM of quality releases that took us OUT of the last decade, provided the Y2K bug doesn't wipe everything related to [read: everyfuckingthing] computers out for some programmer's short-sighted troubles.
[Phlip note - didn't happen, I still had to go to work 01/01/2000, dammit]
Not a lot more to say leading into this year, seeing as how we all remember the shit, don't we?
January
Very slow month, we're given D'Angelo's Voodoo and Jagged Edge's J.E. Heartbreak, neither of which will be counted in this list, but both worth mentioning in the grand scheme of it. Nearing the end of the month, the lack of releases were made better by Ghostface Killah's Supreme Clientele and (to a lesser extent) The LOX with We Are the Streets. I liked both of the albums released this month, owned both of them within a week or 2 of release. Not bad.
February (the 'r' is not silent)
Tha Eastsidaz with Snoop Dogg Presents Tha Eastsidaz kicks off the month with a ton of misspellings, then Bone Thugs-N-Harmony try to remain relevant with BTNHResurrection [Phlip note - DIDN'T WORK!] and Beanie Sigel gave us his debut, The Truth. Steely Dan also released an album this month and that has NOTHING to do with this month and barely has anything to do with this list, except for their getting ALL the money Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz made on their biggest selling single of their respective or combined careers.
Sad month, one out of 3 hip hop albums. This year is off to a slow start, damn!
March
Short rapper Black Rob releases Life Story, which had everyone saying "whoa" and pissed that they bought the album for the rest of the year. Shows, or at least the one I got into free, were okay, though. dead prez held down the middle of the month with Let's Get Free, Common had Like Water For Chocolate and Sean Paul's ACTUAL debut (not the one he was Grammy'd for) Stage One gave us the end of the month. Yes, dancehall counts to me. Drag-On defied the weed-carrier agreement by needing to release The Opposite of H20 and it was monumentally fucking horrible, proving that weed carriers need not release albums.
4-for-5 month, this, and I only regret owning one of the albums, and even IT wasn't horrible at the time.
April
Pretty big month this was. Big Pun's Yeeeah Baby! releases 2 months after his tragic death, hiding a pretty good-at-best album over releases of Da Brat's Unrestricted and Del Tha Funkee Homosapien's Both Sides of the Brain, both released on the same day. Wait, no one was checking for those either way. I have since downloaded the Del album, but have yet to buy it. Rah Digga gave us Dirty Harriet as well, Buju Banton released Rude Boys Inna Ghetto, Cypress Hill released Skull & Bones, Ying Yang Twins released Thug Walkin' and Z-Ro released Z-Ro vs. The World this month as well. Not a great month, not at all.
May
Killah Priest dropped View From Masada and it was as if Jimmy had cracked corn. DJ Quik also gave us Balance & Options, which WAAAAY too many of you STILL sleep on. Ludacris pushed Incognegro from his trunk beginning this month and Spice One just won't fucking go away, releasing The Last Dance, which I view as an empty promise. This month got better toward the end, though!
Deltron 3030, Dilated Peoples and Eminem all dropped on the same day with Deltron 3030, The Platform and The Marshall Mathers LP, respectively. Kid Rock, if you count him, closed the month with History of Rock. Again, not a bad month at all, except for Spice One's involvement. I mean, I didn't get the Killah Priest album either, but I did not have time to even take NAPS, fuck if I had time for coma-inducing rap music in the spring of 2000.
June
Slum Village gave us Fantastic, Vol. 2 and Three 6 Mafia gave us When the Smoke Clears, albums I happen to own for differing reasons, don't judge me. Busta Rhymes dropped Anarchy and still didn't bother explaining that whole "there's only 4 years left" shit from his 1996 album now that the 4 years had passed. Jurassic 5 gave us Quality Control and Nelly started in on beginnign of the ruin of the industry with Country Grammar the same day Kottonmouth Kings released High Society and Lil Kim corpsefucked Biggie with The Notorious K.I.M.. I will not pretend that this was a good month.
July
Beenie Man released Art & Life, Canibus dropped 2000 B.C. -- which would begin the rest of the ruin of his career due to him taking offense to Eminem not wanting to be on the album -- Wyclef Released The Ecleftic: 2 Sides II a Book and Lil Flip released this...
... no, I did not make that up.
3 uot of 4, and the Canibus album was only out of curiosity.
August
This is shaping out to be a good month early on, Big L's The Big Picture and De La Soul's Art Official Intelligence: Mosaic Thump came out early in the month. Energy was taken from the middle of the month with Shaggy's Hotshot and Buju Banton's Dubbing with the Banton, but picked back up with Buju's Unchained Spirit and was ultimately killed to death with KRS-One's A Retrospective and Daz Dillinger's R.A.W.
Damn, can't win em all.
September
Mack 10's The Paper Route starts the hip hop month off, which is a bad sign when one looks over the horizon and sees LL Cool J's G.O.A.T. and Cam'Ron with S.D.E. then Nate Dogg's The Prodigal Son, Juvenile's Playaz of the Game (a rehash of old shit), Sadat X with The State of New York vs. Derek Murphy and Lil Bow Wow's Beware of the Dog. Let the record show that I am STILL not pleased that the material on S.D.E. was different from the mixtape that came before it of the same name, I want my money back!
October
DJ Muggs with Soul Assassins II, Psycho Realm with A War Story Book I, Scarface with Last of a Dying Breed and Jedi Mind Tricks' Violent by Design were a pleasing start, or at least 3/4 of one to begin this month.
I hope you didn't get too excited, though, because Flesh N Bone released 5th Dog Let Loose, Ja Rule released Rule 3:36 and MORE posthumous 2Pac, A Rose that Grew from the Concrete, was loosed on the world later in the month. Ludacris made good on his legwork, getting a proper release with Back for the First Time.
Rap/Rock hybrids came out this month too, with Limp Bizkit's atrocious Chocolate Starfish and the Hotdog Flavored Water and the lesser-known (at the time) and better-talented Linkin Park with Hybrid Theory. I own both albums and still actually listen to one of them 9 years later.
Jay-Z TRIED to save the month with Dynasty Roc La Familia, but that was a compilation album with his name on it for sales and was not very good at the end. Three 6 dropped another album this year as well, Underground Vol. 3, Kings of Memphis and finally Outkast comes and saves the day with Stankonia and Talib Kweli & Hi-Tek with Reflection Eternal: Train of Thought. There was a lot of music released this month and a bit more than half of it was actually good, or at least good enough to warrant owning.
November
The Outlawz continued to fail in the absence of Tupac with Ride wit Us or Collide wit Us, and then Bone Thugs-N-Harmony released a compilation named The Collection: Volume Two.
Capone N Noreaga released The Reunion and Wu Tang Clan began to exacerbate their new-millennium irrelevance with The W. Sad, that.
Speaking of new-millennium irrelevance, Master P's flash in the pan had also dried up after 3 short market-flooding years, shown here with Ghetto Postage. Lucky for me, Lyrisict Lounge vol. 2 came out this day too.
December
Not much here, Lil Wayne's Lights Out, Xzibit's Restless, Cypress Hill Live at the Fillmore and Memphis Bleek's The Understanding. 2 albums of 4 bought and I actually don't regret buying Xzibit's album as I think back on it here in 2009.
Damn, 76 hip hop albums in one year?
Am in heaven?
Um, no... By my count, I own/owned/downloaded 40 of these, for a score of 52.63%, which would have earned me the belt in elementary school.
One looks at this year, myself included as I began to write this, as a GREAT year for hip hop music. I can see some good and a couple or few great albums released, but it seems that the victory on the whole was achieved by way of inundation -- swing 50 times and you'll land a few punches.
History will not prove to be as kind to hip hop released after 2000 as it was to the 80s and 90s. I can't imagine that most of the releases, even from this year will be smiled upon as they were when initially released, and I am not sure they would have sold as many copies as they did outside of their time. Put any of these, save for 3-4 out of the whole year 5 years earlier or later and it flops in my opinion.
Part of me doesn't want to continue in on this journey, but I am too far in to back out now!
I'll see y'all in 2004.
A footnote to this is that I have not done the 80s yet either, but that has more to do with the fact that the decade was EXTRA thin on releases, and a lot of the release dates just can't fucking be found as easily as things released SINCE the advent of the internets... Go figure.
Anyway, I had a request or was asked if I would be doing this immediately upon having finished the 90s series by someone who apparently neglected to read that I specifically mentioned that I probably wouldn't.
More recently, though, I was specifically REQUESTED to scribe my "top 10 albums from 2000-present," and I arrived home from handling business yesterday with my mind on compiling that list, but situations worked contrary to my creative spirit and I couldn't do it...
Got to work today after having finished the business I conducted yesterday afternoon [if I knew at 15:40 what I would find out at 17:36, then I would have been at work on time today, but let's not go there] and STARTED to do a "top ten," but I was beginning to feel like I was writing for one of those list sites, and I am not being paid [much, damned adsense] for writing these, and I couldn't POSSIBLY stop at 10 albums over what is now a 9 year, 10.5 month period. Fuck, I would have had a HARD time choosing using simply the first 4 years of the decade.
All that said, I am going "wayback-ish" for these. See, most anyone reading this, regardless of age or pedigree, should remember the years presented in these. As far as the tags for the blog go, I will be marking these as "wayback" as I did the priors, but my opinion is not that they fully qualify yet.
Today, after all the lead-in, I will be starting with 2000.
Don't expect me to do these in order, I didn't last time either and you can't MAKE me unless you click on the tags with the years HAR-HAR!!!
I no longer have to qualify these years with what grade I was in, I was working and educating full time by the time these years came to be... I was 20 the first half of the year and 21 the second, and in both cases I am months past the last time I had a haircut or red meat, both things I have held onto even up to date.
The year is 2000 and we're full on ready to continue the STORM of quality releases that took us OUT of the last decade, provided the Y2K bug doesn't wipe everything related to [read: everyfuckingthing] computers out for some programmer's short-sighted troubles.
[Phlip note - didn't happen, I still had to go to work 01/01/2000, dammit]
Not a lot more to say leading into this year, seeing as how we all remember the shit, don't we?
January
Very slow month, we're given D'Angelo's Voodoo and Jagged Edge's J.E. Heartbreak, neither of which will be counted in this list, but both worth mentioning in the grand scheme of it. Nearing the end of the month, the lack of releases were made better by Ghostface Killah's Supreme Clientele and (to a lesser extent) The LOX with We Are the Streets. I liked both of the albums released this month, owned both of them within a week or 2 of release. Not bad.
February (the 'r' is not silent)
Tha Eastsidaz with Snoop Dogg Presents Tha Eastsidaz kicks off the month with a ton of misspellings, then Bone Thugs-N-Harmony try to remain relevant with BTNHResurrection [Phlip note - DIDN'T WORK!] and Beanie Sigel gave us his debut, The Truth. Steely Dan also released an album this month and that has NOTHING to do with this month and barely has anything to do with this list, except for their getting ALL the money Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz made on their biggest selling single of their respective or combined careers.
Sad month, one out of 3 hip hop albums. This year is off to a slow start, damn!
March
Short rapper Black Rob releases Life Story, which had everyone saying "whoa" and pissed that they bought the album for the rest of the year. Shows, or at least the one I got into free, were okay, though. dead prez held down the middle of the month with Let's Get Free, Common had Like Water For Chocolate and Sean Paul's ACTUAL debut (not the one he was Grammy'd for) Stage One gave us the end of the month. Yes, dancehall counts to me. Drag-On defied the weed-carrier agreement by needing to release The Opposite of H20 and it was monumentally fucking horrible, proving that weed carriers need not release albums.
4-for-5 month, this, and I only regret owning one of the albums, and even IT wasn't horrible at the time.
April
Pretty big month this was. Big Pun's Yeeeah Baby! releases 2 months after his tragic death, hiding a pretty good-at-best album over releases of Da Brat's Unrestricted and Del Tha Funkee Homosapien's Both Sides of the Brain, both released on the same day. Wait, no one was checking for those either way. I have since downloaded the Del album, but have yet to buy it. Rah Digga gave us Dirty Harriet as well, Buju Banton released Rude Boys Inna Ghetto, Cypress Hill released Skull & Bones, Ying Yang Twins released Thug Walkin' and Z-Ro released Z-Ro vs. The World this month as well. Not a great month, not at all.
May
Killah Priest dropped View From Masada and it was as if Jimmy had cracked corn. DJ Quik also gave us Balance & Options, which WAAAAY too many of you STILL sleep on. Ludacris pushed Incognegro from his trunk beginning this month and Spice One just won't fucking go away, releasing The Last Dance, which I view as an empty promise. This month got better toward the end, though!
Deltron 3030, Dilated Peoples and Eminem all dropped on the same day with Deltron 3030, The Platform and The Marshall Mathers LP, respectively. Kid Rock, if you count him, closed the month with History of Rock. Again, not a bad month at all, except for Spice One's involvement. I mean, I didn't get the Killah Priest album either, but I did not have time to even take NAPS, fuck if I had time for coma-inducing rap music in the spring of 2000.
June
Slum Village gave us Fantastic, Vol. 2 and Three 6 Mafia gave us When the Smoke Clears, albums I happen to own for differing reasons, don't judge me. Busta Rhymes dropped Anarchy and still didn't bother explaining that whole "there's only 4 years left" shit from his 1996 album now that the 4 years had passed. Jurassic 5 gave us Quality Control and Nelly started in on beginnign of the ruin of the industry with Country Grammar the same day Kottonmouth Kings released High Society and Lil Kim corpsefucked Biggie with The Notorious K.I.M.. I will not pretend that this was a good month.
July
Beenie Man released Art & Life, Canibus dropped 2000 B.C. -- which would begin the rest of the ruin of his career due to him taking offense to Eminem not wanting to be on the album -- Wyclef Released The Ecleftic: 2 Sides II a Book and Lil Flip released this...
3 uot of 4, and the Canibus album was only out of curiosity.
August
This is shaping out to be a good month early on, Big L's The Big Picture and De La Soul's Art Official Intelligence: Mosaic Thump came out early in the month. Energy was taken from the middle of the month with Shaggy's Hotshot and Buju Banton's Dubbing with the Banton, but picked back up with Buju's Unchained Spirit and was ultimately killed to death with KRS-One's A Retrospective and Daz Dillinger's R.A.W.
Damn, can't win em all.
September
Mack 10's The Paper Route starts the hip hop month off, which is a bad sign when one looks over the horizon and sees LL Cool J's G.O.A.T. and Cam'Ron with S.D.E. then Nate Dogg's The Prodigal Son, Juvenile's Playaz of the Game (a rehash of old shit), Sadat X with The State of New York vs. Derek Murphy and Lil Bow Wow's Beware of the Dog. Let the record show that I am STILL not pleased that the material on S.D.E. was different from the mixtape that came before it of the same name, I want my money back!
October
DJ Muggs with Soul Assassins II, Psycho Realm with A War Story Book I, Scarface with Last of a Dying Breed and Jedi Mind Tricks' Violent by Design were a pleasing start, or at least 3/4 of one to begin this month.
I hope you didn't get too excited, though, because Flesh N Bone released 5th Dog Let Loose, Ja Rule released Rule 3:36 and MORE posthumous 2Pac, A Rose that Grew from the Concrete, was loosed on the world later in the month. Ludacris made good on his legwork, getting a proper release with Back for the First Time.
Rap/Rock hybrids came out this month too, with Limp Bizkit's atrocious Chocolate Starfish and the Hotdog Flavored Water and the lesser-known (at the time) and better-talented Linkin Park with Hybrid Theory. I own both albums and still actually listen to one of them 9 years later.
Jay-Z TRIED to save the month with Dynasty Roc La Familia, but that was a compilation album with his name on it for sales and was not very good at the end. Three 6 dropped another album this year as well, Underground Vol. 3, Kings of Memphis and finally Outkast comes and saves the day with Stankonia and Talib Kweli & Hi-Tek with Reflection Eternal: Train of Thought. There was a lot of music released this month and a bit more than half of it was actually good, or at least good enough to warrant owning.
November
The Outlawz continued to fail in the absence of Tupac with Ride wit Us or Collide wit Us, and then Bone Thugs-N-Harmony released a compilation named The Collection: Volume Two.
Capone N Noreaga released The Reunion and Wu Tang Clan began to exacerbate their new-millennium irrelevance with The W. Sad, that.
Speaking of new-millennium irrelevance, Master P's flash in the pan had also dried up after 3 short market-flooding years, shown here with Ghetto Postage. Lucky for me, Lyrisict Lounge vol. 2 came out this day too.
December
Not much here, Lil Wayne's Lights Out, Xzibit's Restless, Cypress Hill Live at the Fillmore and Memphis Bleek's The Understanding. 2 albums of 4 bought and I actually don't regret buying Xzibit's album as I think back on it here in 2009.
Damn, 76 hip hop albums in one year?
Am in heaven?
Um, no... By my count, I own/owned/downloaded 40 of these, for a score of 52.63%, which would have earned me the belt in elementary school.
One looks at this year, myself included as I began to write this, as a GREAT year for hip hop music. I can see some good and a couple or few great albums released, but it seems that the victory on the whole was achieved by way of inundation -- swing 50 times and you'll land a few punches.
History will not prove to be as kind to hip hop released after 2000 as it was to the 80s and 90s. I can't imagine that most of the releases, even from this year will be smiled upon as they were when initially released, and I am not sure they would have sold as many copies as they did outside of their time. Put any of these, save for 3-4 out of the whole year 5 years earlier or later and it flops in my opinion.
Part of me doesn't want to continue in on this journey, but I am too far in to back out now!
I'll see y'all in 2004.
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Comments
That year, I was knee deep in liquor, cooch & cooch. & work. I like the "wayback" lists because the music is a memory marker, if you will. So, even without hearing the actual music, it's an ambient reminder of what was happening then.
Damn, now you have me reminiscing about all the glorious 'tang I was suffocated by....
Thanks!