10 Best Hip-Hop Albums Of The 1980s - Ranked

Before KRS-One would make waves as one of the first prolifically conscious rappers in the game, he found commercial and artistic success with his former DJ Scott La Rock as the duo Boogie Down Productions.

The two were part of the “Bridge Wars” of the late 1980s on the East Coast, and beefed with other rappers such as Marley Marl for supremacy in the local area, giving an early taste of the dog-eat-dog world that the rap industry would become in the 1990s.

Songs like “9MM Goes Bang” and the titular track “Criminal Minded” convey their plights for dominance in their neighborhood, but tracks like “Poetry” and “Elementary” show their depth as a musical act in attempting to use intellectual thought to create music from. Their music is dark in tone but knows how to deliver haunting imagery with bombastic flair, characteristic of the era.

Lyrically speaking, KRS-One was able to find dignity in being a gangster, something that would not be echoed in his later work following the violent death of Scott La Rock in 1987 that influenced KRS-One to start rapping about politically and socially conscious subjects.

This does not hinder the legacy of this enduring album as one that surpasses the norms of the generation it was presented in along with using funky samples to splice together mixes that would influence independent music engineers for decades following this album.