Top 10 albums that defined boom bap

Boom bap was not born in an expensive studio. It was born from a turntable, a pile of old records and one sampler. A producer found four seconds of drums on a soul album, looped them and put rap on top. The nineties are the decade when that principle turned into an art form. These are the ten albums it all stands on. You should not be missing a single one at home.

The duo that turned boom bap into a craft. Guru rapped in one tone, no shouting and no posing. Behind him DJ Premier chopped samples so precisely that you know his beat within two bars. The album came after a four year break and it is their best.

You Know My Steez and Above the Clouds with Inspectah Deck of Wu-Tang Clan are a textbook of the New York beat. On this album Premier proved that even in 1998, when glossy pop-rap ruled the radio, you could still win with an old record and a chopped drum break.

Fun fact:Premier never lets a sampled melody play as it was. He chops it into single notes and puts them back in a different order. That is why you often cannot recognise the original even when you know it well.

Snoop arrived at the microphone with a voice nobody in rap had. Lazy, slowed down, as if he could not care less. Dr. Dre produced his debut right after Snoop became a star on Dre's own album.

Gin and Juice, Who Am I (What's My Name)? and Murder Was the Case set the West Coast sound for years to come. The album entered Billboard at number one as the first debut ever to do so, selling 803 thousand copies in its first week.

Fun fact: That was more than the other five best selling albums of that week managed together.

Havoc and Prodigy of Mobb Deep were twenty when the album came out, rapping about Queensbridge, the largest public housing project in New York. No posing, just cold air and claustrophobia.

Shook Ones Pt. II is one of the best beats hip hop ever produced, and you know it from films and from battle rap. Havoc produced it himself, betting on dark piano loops and a dry drum break.

Fun fact:Nas and his Illmatic came out of the very same project. Queensbridge gave the nineties two albums that are still quoted as the peak of the genre.

Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean and Pras recorded the album in the basement of Wyclef's uncle in New Jersey. They turned it into a studio and called it the Booga Basement. The budget was small, but the band had singing, rapping and reggae in one place.

Ready or Not, Fu-Gee-La and the cover of Killing Me Softly took hip hop onto radio all over the world. An estimated 22 million copies sold, still the most for any hip hop group album.

Fun fact:The Fugees broke up shortly afterwards. Lauryn Hill then released a single solo album and it became another jewel of the decade.

While most of the scene was getting harder, A Tribe Called Quest went the other way. Q-Tip and Phife Dawg built the album on jazz bass, minimal beats and lyrics with no aggression in them.

Check the Rhime and Scenario, which introduced Busta Rhymes to the world, are still party classics. The album opened the whole jazz rap wave and you can hear it in everything from The Roots to Common.

Fun fact: For Verses from the Abstract Q-Tip called in jazz bassist Ron Carter, who had played with Miles Davis. It was one of the first real collaborations between a jazz musician and a hip hop group.

2Pac walked out of prison after eleven months, once Suge Knight and Jimmy Iovine put up his 1.4 million dollar bail. The condition was three albums for Death Row. He finished the first one in six weeks.

California Love, How Do U Want It and 2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted were consecutive number ones. With nine million copies sold in the US it is the most successful rap album of the nineties.

Fun fact: It was the first double album of new material in hip hop history, 27 tracks in total. Pac died seven months after it came out.

Biggie packed as many words into every bar as would fit, and it still sounded as relaxed as a conversation. He recorded the debut with Puff Daddy and a crew of producers that included DJ Premier and Easy Mo Bee.

Juicy is the finest story ever told about getting from nothing to somewhere. Big Poppa and Warning made him a star, and the album still holds the title of the best East Coast debut.

Fun fact: The baby on the cover came from a modelling agency and got 150 dollars for a two hour shoot. The man who later claimed to be that baby is Keithroy Yearwood, but the label never confirmed it, the paperwork was lost.

Dr. Dre left N.W.A. and instead of more aggression he built something entirely new. He took the funk of George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic, added deep bass and whistling synths, and slowed it down to the tempo of a Californian summer.

It is called G-funk, and Nuthin' but a 'G' Thang and Let Me Ride turned it into the most played thing of the decade. The album sold 5.7 million copies in the US and built the power of Death Row Records.

Fun fact: Officially it is Dre's solo album, but Snoop is on almost every track. That is how Dre made him a star before his own debut even existed.

Nine rappers from Staten Island, one producer and a pile of kung fu films. RZA built the beats on noisy, out of tune samples and let them sound as if they had been recorded in a basement. That is exactly what made Wu-Tang Clan a phenomenon.

C.R.E.A.M., Protect Ya Neck and Method Man proved that nine people can take turns on one record and nothing gets lost. Every member later became a brand of his own.

Fun fact: RZA had it written into the contract that every member could release his solo album on any label he wanted. That is how Liquid Swords by GZA, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx by Raekwon and Tical by Method Man happened, and Wu-Tang took over half the scene.

Number one, no argument. Nas was twenty, he grew up in Queensbridge and for his debut he called in the best producers in the city: DJ Premier, Pete Rock, Large Professor, Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest and the newcomer L.E.S.

Ten tracks, under forty minutes and not one second wasted. N.Y. State of Mind, The World Is Yours and Life's a Bitch are the benchmark every new rap debut is still measured against.

Fun fact: It sold only 330 thousand copies in its first year, so commercially it flopped. On the outro of Life's a Bitch the cornet is played by Nas's father, the jazz musician Olu Dara.

The nineties are still the measure in hip hop. The classics keep coming out on vinyl and CD, Kendrick Lamar and Eminem keep quoting those beats, and samples from that decade turn up in today's pop hits. If you want to dig deeper, put on Outkast, Cypress Hill, De La Soul, Public Enemy, Jay-Z and Big L.

And if you want to know how that beat is made, the principle has not changed. You need a turntable, a pile of records and a sampler or a groovebox. Add a microphone, DJ headphones and the rest is patience. The previous part of the series is about nu metal.