It’s been twenty years since The Notorious B.I.G. dropped his seminal debut album. “Ready To Die” was a hit, making the burly emcee from Bedford-Stuyvesant the most visible New York rapper of his era and establishing Bad Boy Entertainment as the new powerhouse label in hip-hop.
It was 20 years ago today that Nas released his seminal debut album, Illlmatic. It wasn’t the huge crossover hit that, say, The Chronic or Doggystyle had been in the previous years. And it didn’t quite re-ignite the East Coast’s hardcore aesthetic, either; acts like Redman, Onyx, Das EFX, Black Moon had started doing that as early as 1992. But what Illmatic did was introduce the world to a thoughtful and gifted rhyme-writer from the Queensbridge Projects, and in doing so, it returned the traditional New York City emcee to hip-hop prominence.
Coming almost exactly one year after Dr. Dre’s smash solo debut, The Chronic, Snoop’s first album arrived at a unique moment in rap history.
It was an amazing year for music in 1993. Kurt Cobain was beginning to crack under the pressure of worldwide adulation, and Janet Jackson was
Naughty By Nature remains an act that move the crowd–and they have a catalog that dwarfs many of their more-celebrated contemporaries.
Some landmark albums turned 20 this past year, so at the risk of making some people feel really old and some others feel really young, here are 10 classic albums that crossed the two-decade mark in 2012
