Definitive Jux has in many ways helped to define the past ten years of hip hop underground with artists such as Aesop Rock, Mr. Lif, Cannibal Ox, RJD2, and many others. Def Jux founder El-P released his fourth album in 2007, I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead—a dark and gritty tapestry of urban industrial sounds.

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#29: Portishead – Third (2009)

Their first album in 12 years, Portishead’s Third returns to the sexy, sophisticated, and cinematic sound they’ve become so well known for, while trading their signature scratchy analog loops for an almost plasticine minimalism. Between this, a new album from Tricky, and the recent release from Massive Attack, it almost feels like the late 90′s all over again.

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#28: Mos Def – The Ecstatic (2009)

I have been a huge fan of Mos Def since his 1999 breakthrough debut Black on Both Sides, which has been a unique challenge over the past decade. Sure, Mos has quickly become one of my favorite film actors—he’s the only hip hop artist i can think of who has successfuly crossed over into acting without automatically becoming a shitty musician. I loved him in Brown Sugar and Be Kind Rewind, and I thought casting him as Ford Prefect in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe was an unexpected revelation. But his albums over the past ten years have been hit-or-miss—while there were a few good tracks on True Magic and The New Danger, neither album measured up to the brilliance of Black on Both Sides. Which is why i am so in love with The Ecstatic. Infused with Latin, Afrobeat, and Bollywood influences, it is an album that sounds as global as it does personal, representing a welcome return to form while pushing his signature sound further into the future.

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Here’s one of the things I love about hip hop: a music that was created by some of the most politcally and economically oppressed people in American history has matured into a legitimate global language, through which people of any race, nationality, or relgious creed can share their unique perspectives using poetry, rhythm, and sampled fragments of their own culture. Take, for example, DJ Krush—a Japanese DJ who does not speak a word of English, yet is internationally renowned as one of the most respected artists and producers in all of hip hop. Krush’s story is actually quite fascinating, as you can see from this wikipedia excerpt:

"Ishi was born in 1962 in Tokyo. Ishi dropped out of school at an early age and joined a local gang, and a few years later, the yakuza. Early into his career as a yakuza underling, Ishi discovered a severed finger wrapped in paper on his desk. Later, after discovering that it had belonged to his best friend, he decided to leave the yakuza and cut ties with the criminal underworld.

One day in the early 1980s, Ishi went to the movies with his girlfriend and saw the film Wild Style, the first hip hop motion picture directed by Charlie Ahearn. He quickly got the inspiration to become a hip hop musician, and made the firm decision to become a DJ. The day after seeing this movie, he headed to instrument shops looking for equipment. At this time the term “mixer” was unknown to most of Tokyo’s electronic store salesmen. After having a hard time buying the things he needed, Ishi started his career as one of the first hip hop artists in Japan."

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I was in 7th grade when I bought my very first cassette tape from the gas station at the end of my driveway. It was called The Real Thing by Faith No More. I had no idea at the time that I had just discovered an artist I would be pathologically infatuated with for decades to come: Mike Patton, vocalist for Faith No More, Mr. Bungle, Tomahawk, Lovage, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Fantomas, and a handful of other side projects. While his previous work may not be suitable for the more delicate cochleas of the world, this is probably his most accessible album yet, featuring some amazing collaborations with a wide range of artists including Massive Attack, Norah Jones, Dan the Automator, Amon Tobin, and Bebel Gilberto. “I don’t listen to the radio, but if I did, this is what I’d want it to sound like,” Patton says of the Peeping Tom album. “This is my version of pop music. In a way, this is an exercise for me: taking all these things I’ve learned over the years and putting them into a pop format.”

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Take a look at the album cover above. This was not an album cover chosen in bad taste as a desparate way to get attention—believe it or not, this album was scheduled for release during the same week as 9/11. Obviously the release was postponed and the final artwork switched out at the last minute, but this morbid coincidence has become somewhat legendary in hip hop culture, setting an appropriately ominous tone for Boots Riley’s Marxist-influenced political rhymes and funk-infused beats.

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Long before Jimmy Fallon crowned them "The Best Band on Television" (which they are), The Roots had already earned the reputation as "The Best Band in Hip Hop". One of the things I love about just about any Roots album is how they straddle the line between hip hop and rock music, reminding me how few differences there really are between these two genres—both share the same general formula (see #37: The Black Keys), with one tending to put more emphasis upon melody, and the other upon rythym. But in the end, rock and roll and hip hop are more similar than they are different, distinct only in their basic aesthetic vectors—one rocking the horizontal, the other bumping all along the vertical. The Roots are one of the few bands who know how to do both.

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This is one of those albums that simply makes you feel good. What amazes me about this album is how it can be at once so joyful and so melancholy, a celebration of some of the more precious moments in life (Higher?!, Freaks Freaks, Brand New Day), while simultaneously mourning the ever-increasing weight of time that separates us from our most cherished memories (The Last Sunshine, Weight of the World, Growing Old).

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I have a bit of an obsession for Quannum, the San Francisco-based label that includes artists like DJ Shadow, Blackalicious, Lyrics Born, Lateef the Truthspeaker, The Lifesavas, Pigeon John, Apsci, Honeycut, and others. In fact, i would go so far as to say that the Quannum collective represents some of the most important hip hop ever made—not in terms of market saturation or even their influence upon the rest of hip hop culture (though fairly well known throughout the underground, they are still somewhat beneath the radar of the mainstream), but purely in terms of content. Few artists today make music that is so soulful, so intelligent, and so damn spiritual. Case in point: Ambush is the love child of Lateef the Truthspeaker (from Latyrx) and Chief Xcel (the DJ/Producer from Blackalicious), containing a nearly-perfect 40 minutes of some of the best hip hop made in the past decade.

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Described by Trent Reznor as "a soundtrack for daydreams," 2008′s Ghosts I-IV (NIN’s first independent release since leaving Interscope) was a bit of a departure from the typical Nine Inch Nails sound, featuring almost two hours worth of darkly sublime instrumentals that slide through your consciousness and pull you into a sort of fever-dream reverie. "The rules were as follows," describes Trent: "10 weeks, no clear agenda, no overthinking, everything driven by impulse. Whatever happens during that time gets released as … something." He continues: "When we started working with the music, we would generally start with a sort of visual reference that we had imagined: a place, or a setting, or a situation. And then attempt to describe that with sound and texture and melody. And treat it, in a sense, as if it were a soundtrack." Ghosts I-IV is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license, allowing anyone to use these tracks for any non-profit purpose, and there are rumors that Trent is currently recording a followup album, presumedly titled Ghosts V-VIII.

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