Here we are, Hip Hop fans, neophytes, and everyone in between- Day 10! I hope you all have been as excited and moved as I’ve been at this challenge thus far. Big up to everyone reading, everyone posting, and everyone who has discovered something being here. I think we’ve shown that with hip hop, it’s not just what you know, it’s what you feel, and what you like, or love, or admire that is worth sharing with the community here.

Today is perhaps more straightforward than other categories/themes have been this week- post a track from an album and talk about that album!

If you have time to do one other thing today, please have a look at this fantastic feature about the evolution of the rap album-it’s a quick but interesting read. It points out that the full-length rap album came after the early singles in the genre, because the primary format for recorded hip hop in its infancy was the 12″ album. And of course this makes a lot of sense if we remember how the music came about in the first place, moving through house parties and clubs and the streets via DJs and MCs. It also points to work by The Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, and De La Soul as early, essential examples of how rap and hip hop began to formalize and experiment with the sequence of songs, with skits, and with concept albums that proved that hip hop was destined to be an undeniable vehicle for boundless creativity.

Now, you can google ‘best rap albums of all time’ or something along those lines and get eleventy-hundred lists from critics, from hipsters, from music nerds, from music magazines, from randos on Reddit, dudes with blogs, etc, but what I thought we could do today is leave all that to the side and just share a track from an album that you want represented here. Maybe it’s the first album you heard or bought. Maybe it’s your all-time favorite. Maybe it’s not your favorite but one that you critically admire. Maybe it’s the only hip hop/rap album you’ve ever listened to in its entirety (and look, THAT’S FINE! Please don’t be intimidated by other picks, etc in the community-everyone can speak up here regardless!). Maybe it’s not your favorite, but one you think changed the game and is worth being mentioned. Lots of options on how you want to go about picking something!

This certainly wasn’t the first hip hop album I heard in its entirety, and I don’t necessarily think it’s my ‘favorite’ hop hop/rap album (not that I even have one, maybe more like a top 5, and it would be there), but it is a work that has shaped not only my relationship to music, but to my Blackness and my sense of my place in the world. It came along right as I was thinking deeply and meaningfully about all of these things, as I was getting ready to graduate from college, and I never would have thought that a hip hop record would be something that had such an influence on the grown person I would become. The album has a breadth of genres that are infused with Mos Def’s identity as a Black man, and with his understanding of what genres like punk, reggae, and ultimately hip hop can be when they are wielded in the service of a search of Black self-expression. So many things that never occured to me to be part of a matrix of possibilities for Black identity and creativity are expressed here. And hearing him, on this particular track, saying and singing ‘I want Black people to be free’, to put it succinctly, healed a lot of hurt I never knew I had.

So, today-

1.) The tricky/fun thing about this 30 day ‘challenge’ is that you get one choice (see, it’s a challenge! If you’ve already mentioned a song from an album you’d like to pick on a previous day, it’s cool-just pick a different song if you can. 🙂

2.) In order to keep the thread from borking, please limit yourself to one YouTube/media link per post. If someone ‘beats you to it’ and posts a song you would’ve posted, reply under their post saying why you like this song/why it was your pick as well, etc. Let’s not give Disqus a reason to make the thread hard to navigate for those of us listening to the songs! If you want to mention some others, of course that’s fine!

3.) Let’s keep this as positive as we can. Don’t yuck anyone’s yum, don’t snark on someone who may not be as familiar as others, don’t ‘Um, actually’ people, etc. Remember that it’s not always possible to know what a song or artist means to someone, and try to give grace around that. Ain’t nobody earning any Internet Points out here.