The first to break away from the seminal 1980s gangster rap group, he released a run of brilliant solo tracks, including this chilled out effort from his 1992 album ‘The Predator’. Like Dr Dre, Ice Cube was a former member of NWA. The 1992 track scored a Grammy and proved that rap could be as smooth as soul music.Ī house party staple since 1992, House of Pain’s seminal ‘Jump Around’ mixes tennis metaphors ( “I’ll serve your ass like John McEnroe”) with big squelchy beats and a serious sample from Bob & Earl’s soul classic ‘Harlem Shuffle’ – all seamlessly produced by Cypress Hill’s DJ Muggs. Jazzier than your average 1990s hip-hop hit, Digable Planets’ debut single featured a horn section and a laid-back, lo-fi vibe. Add to that a holler-along chorus and this 1993 track – from the New Jersey group’s third album ‘19 Naughty III’ – boasts legendary status.ĭigable Planets, ‘Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)’ Sampling everyone from James Brown to the Isley Brothers and Peter Gabriel, there’s no way ‘Hip Hop Hooray’ couldn’t have been a hit. ‘911 Is A Joke’ is Flavor Flav’s caustic take down of the US emergency services, slamming the ambulance response rate to black areas and calling out “911 is a fake live saver”. Public Enemy, one of the most important rap acts of the 1980s, maintained their relevance in the following decade. It was this track that set up Snoop as one of the biggest characters in the game.
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A Dr Dre production, it sees Snoop in his happy place: a debauched party full of weed, women and booze. Snoop’s second single showcased the rapper’s now iconic, laconic drawl and received a Grammy nomination in the process. It was as socially conscious as it was downright fun, mixing old school samples of Ike Turner with the group’s giddy flow. The pinnacle of earnest, backpacker hip-hop, ‘Concrete Schoolyard’ was this Los Angeles collective’s breakthrough track.
Aggro, awesome and showcasing some serious scratching, it also has one of the best music videos of the decade: a Spike Jonze directed, 1970s cop show piss-take, complete with dodgy fake ‘taches. This former hardcore punk band showed a flash of their rowdy roots with this riff-heavy 1994 single. Somehow though, in his 1998 hit single, Jay managed to make stage brats sound cool, going platinum in the process. Hip-hop has used some strange samples in its time, but none more odd than Jay Z’s use of a chorus of squealing kiddies from the musical Annie. With Snoop Dogg on board, this seamlessly funky four minutes set the bar for the next twenty years. ‘Let’s Talk About Sex’ wasn’t just a dancefloor filler, but a prescient education in safe sex and a timely debunking of harmful media censorship.įollowing his formative stint with NWA, Dr Dre slipped into the limelight with his debut solo album ‘The Chronic’, which just so happened to be one of the best rap records of all time. The first ladies of 1990s hip-hop, New York trio Salt, Pepa and DJ Spinderella broke down barriers with their effortlessly fresh tunes and ballsy attitude.
Wu-Tang Clan’s late, great ODB shows off one of the most recognisable voices of the 1990s with this filthy and fun guttural groover. Rude and raucous, ‘Shimmy Shimmy Ya’ is one hell of a party tune. ‘CREAM’ – led by Method Man, Raekwon and Inspectah Deck – is a celebration of 1990s hip-hop’s most precious commodity: “dollar dollar bills, y’all”. The Wu-Tang Clan are the most innovative, cinematic and outstanding hip-hop crew of all time, and their 1993 debut, ‘Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)’, is often considered the finest rap album ever released.
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