90s Rap List Starts at #90: Complex's Deep Cuts Before the Icons Show Up

A list claiming to rank "The 90 Best Rap Albums of the '90s" doesn't open with Illmatic — it opens with the ten records sitting at #90 through #81. That sequencing is itself an editorial choice: show readers the fringes of the golden era first, then work toward the center.

Sitting at #90 is Mos Def's Black on Both Sides, released in 1999 on Rawkus Records — his solo debut. The album opens with a spoken intro asking, essentially, "before you ask where rap is going, ask yourself where you're going," and from there the record tries everything: tracks about Brooklyn, a rare cut actually about clean drinking water, and a few songs that barely qualify as rap at all, closer to chant than verse.

At #89, B.G.'s Chopper City in the Ghetto (1999, Cash Money/Universal) offers a different kind of contrast. Within the same Cash Money Millionaires roster where Juvenile scored the crossover smash with 400 Degreez and Lil Wayne would later become the label's signature voice, B.G. got the most traditional storyteller's flow of the bunch. Half of the sixteen tracks are Hot Boys posse cuts, but solo standouts like "Hard Times" carry a darker undertone beneath Mannie Fresh's usual celebratory production.

Debut Albums That Decided a Decade

Buried in this stretch of the list are several albums where the debut effectively set the course for everything after. King Tee's Tha Triflin' Album, from 1993, arrived five years after his 1988 debut Act a Fool. Made with DJ Pooh, the record not only proved King Tee could keep pace with a new generation but also gave the then-unknown Tha Alkaholiks their first real spotlight on the posse cut "Got It Bad Y'all" — one veteran opening the door for the next wave.

Ol' Dirty Bastard's Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version (1995, Elektra) was also a debut, and RZA's production gave ODB's off-kilter flow on "Brooklyn Zoo" room to run — fifty-some bars barreling into a hook that refuses to sit on the beat, somehow becoming his signature performance in the process.

Redman's Whut? Thee Album (1992, Def Jam) traces back to a very specific moment: in 1990, a 20-year-old Reggie Noble freestyled backstage at an MC Lyte show in Newark, New Jersey, catching the ear of EPMD's Erick Sermon. That led to a guest verse on EPMD's "Hardcore" and, the following year, a deal with Def Jam. The album's "Time 4 Sum Akshun" later became Mike Tyson's entrance music for his 1995 comeback fight — Tyson knocked Peter McNeeley down twice before the ref stopped it in the first round.

The regional angle runs just as deep. Eightball & MJG's Comin' Out Hard (1993, Suave House Records) was recorded in Houston with label head Tony Draper, but the samples came almost entirely from Memphis's Orange Mound neighborhood — "records our parents left behind," as Eightball told NPR in a 2014 interview. The cover shows the Houston skyline, but the sound is pure Memphis soul.

Scarface's Mr. Scarface Is Back (1991, Rap-A-Lot Records) carries a title that's almost a contradiction — it's his solo debut, yet it's framed as a comeback, because Geto Boys had already dropped We Can't Be Stopped just three months earlier. EPMD's Business as Usual (1990, Def Jam/RAL/Columbia) pulled off two things at once: it brought LL Cool J back to his harder-edged form on "Rampage," and it handed the closing verse on "Hardcore" to a still-unknown Redman.

And Compton's Most Wanted's Music to Driveby (1992, Orpheus Records) is a reminder that Death Row wasn't the only story coming out of early-'90s Los Angeles — MC Eiht's work on "Hood Took Me Under" traffics in a darker, more paranoid register than N.W.A ever did.

This piece was originally published in 2014 and has been reordered for this release, dated March 2026. The full ranking from #80 through #1 was not included in the source material excerpted here.