4 Best Sounding Hip Hop Albums

If you want to be a hip hop producer, here are your reference materials. Add these five albums to your playlist, sit down and educate your ears.

The albums on this list were selected for their sonic qualities and not for the musical and/or lyrical content, how influential they were etc. – hence ‘best sounding hip hop albums’.

What I look for is clarity throughout the audio frequency spectrum:

• good sound separation
• balanced low end
• clear midrange (present vocals sitting nicely along instrumentation)
• not overly dull nor overly saturated top end.

Notes:

My listening setup is:

- Focusrite Scarlett 2i4 audio interface
- Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro (80Ω version) headphones
- files are all 320kbps MP3s.

Not the best of setups, but not the worst either.

Here we go, in chronological order:

Nas – Illmatic (1994)

Pitchfork’s Hartley Goldstein called it “a meticulously crafted essence of everything that makes hip-hop music great; it’s practically a sonic strand of the genre’s DNA”. In his review of the reissue from 2012, Jeff Weiss writes:

The alembic of soul jazz samples, SP-1200s, broken nose breaks, and raw rap distilled the Henny, no chaser ideal of boom-bap.

Eminem – Slim Shady LP (1999)

LA Times says the “only thing hindering the album is a sometimes flat production that takes away from the power of Eminem’s verbal mayhem”, but that’s what I like about it. Sparse beats, arrangements that breathe.

Dr Dre – The Chronic 2001 (1999)

Not to be outdone by his protege, Dre released his sophomore record the same year as the Slim Shady LP dropped. While The Chronic from 1992 is often considered as one of the most influential hip hop albums, sonically The Chronic 2001 is far superior.

Dead Prez – Let’s Get Free (2000)

Heavy political messages neatly packaged into a smooth hip hop gem.

Honorable mentions:

Kanye West – The College Dropout (2004)

Pimp C – Pimpalation (2006)

Of course, this is only my opinion. Do you agree with my selection? Let me know in the comments below.

Cover photo by Scott Schiller, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Lessons from Kanye West x Paul McCartney

The recent collaboration between the two industry veterans raised some eyebrows. Mine also assumed an elevated position as I was trying to get my head around Only One and FourFiveSeconds.

Surely I wasn’t the only one who found the two songs a bit unusual (?) No synths and no drums, Kanye singing throughout: it took me a while to adjust. I must admit, I didn’t like the songs at first listen. Or second. However, they did make me think about the production choices made by the team behind the songs.

Focus on the Important

Both tracks have very simple arrangements.

Only One features only a soft electric organ (played by McCartney) and autotuned vocals from Kanye. There are multipart harmony vocals in a few places added for emphasis with some of them overdriven, making them sound like an electric guitar.

In FourFiveSeconds the only instruments accompanying the lead vocals are an acoustic guitar, again from McCartney, and a bass guitar barely audible on smaller listening systems. An electric guitar makes a subtle appearance around the choruses, but that’s pretty much it.

By opting for stripped-down arrangements, the production teams made us focus on the most important elements: the song and the performance. Many critics have pointed out that FourFiveSeconds might be the best vocal performance from Rihanna to date and complimented her phrasing and timbre – how often do we think about these aspects of a pop song anymore? 

FourFiveSeconds is the first time we’ve heard Kanye sing with his vocals slightly-less-obviously autotuned. McCartney’s guitar sounds kind of sloppy, like it was recorded on the first take. The bass line is also nonchalant. These were all conscious production choices.

The music videos for both tracks follow the same aesthetic principles. Despite being unconstrained by budgetary concerns, the videos are dead simple. The Only One video looks like it was shot on an iPhone 4 (there’s even no 1080p option).

It seems that the keyword for these two projects was ‘raw.’

The Lesson

We all-in-one songwriters/producers/engineers get so caught up in the audio side of things we forget the music side of things. No amount of professional grade plugins or mixing skills is going to save a bad song or a lacking performance. By pointing this out I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel as I’m sure everyone knows these things, but I think it’s worth a reminder.

Music is about emotion. Emotion is conveyed through the musical content of the song and enhanced by production and post-production. Make your production serve the song, not the other way around. If a track from a hip hop artist doesn’t call for drums, don’t put drums on it. Leave that sick synth patch for another track if it’s taking away all the impact from a great vocal.

https://twitter.com/WhatTheFFacts/status/572077871591776258

It all starts at the source. Good songwriting and a convincing performance are producers’ main building blocks – everything else is just icing on the cake.

Make songs, not audio files.

Also, check out Nick Jonas’ version of Only One. Do you feel that the autotune in the original takes away from Kanye’s performance and the message of the song or does it enhance it?

Cover photo by Timothy Tsui, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.