10 Perfect Hip-Hop Albums With No Bad Songs

As the '80s started to wane, the next decade was about to be very kind to the hip hop side of things. After Vanilla Ice turned the entire concept of rap into a joke, the new school needed to have a lot more bite to it if it wanted to be taken seriously. And here we had a young kid straight from the boroughs of New York whose bars sounded like he had lived three lifetimes already.

Compared to the usual freestyling you see from other rappers, Nas really started to see his craft like poetry, spewing out different literary references in his bars while also commenting on the state of the world he has around him. Coming from the inner city, Nas doesn't really like what he sees, being one of the forerunners for gangsta rap and what kind of darkness is happening on the wrong side of the tracks like NY State of Mind and Life's a B*tch.

You also have to remember that Nas was barely out of his teens here, and hearing him write something like this almost sounds like he's had too many scars from his past. Just the line about not being able to sleep because "sleep is the cousin of death" tells you this is a guy with a few extra miles on his soul. It's not the cheeriest of hip hop albums, but one that's necessary if you want to understand what it means to be a gangsta.