Hip-hop in ten albums: where to start

Jazz, funk, spoken word and Black American history poured into one furious, generous record. It is the album that made the case for hip-hop as the most ambitious music of its decade, and it never once condescends to the listener. Start here and the rest of this list falls into place.

Nine MCs, one basement, and the blueprint for everything raw in East Coast rap. RZA's dusty, menacing production and the crew's relentless trading of verses turned a shoestring budget into a sound the whole genre chased for a decade. This is the foundation.

Maximalist, operatic and bottomless: an artist throwing every idea he had at the wall and watching almost all of it stick. It reset what a rap record could aspire to be, and a generation of producers is still mining it for parts.

The most effortless storytelling rap has produced. Biggie moves from stick-up kid to kingpin to despair without ever raising his voice, and the hooks stay radio-perfect even at their darkest. Proof that craft and menace can share a single bar.

Winter in Queensbridge, rendered in grey and steel. Havoc's claustrophobic beats and Prodigy's ice-cold writing make this the definitive hardcore New York record, the one every grimy rap album since has had to answer to.

The G-funk bible. Dre's widescreen West Coast production, all live bass and Sunday-afternoon menace, set the commercial and sonic template that rap radio followed deep into the 2000s. It also introduced the world, properly, to a kid from Detroit named Eminem.

Pac at his most reflective: vulnerable, paranoid and impossibly charismatic. Recorded under genuine duress, it trades bravado for mortality and stays the most human record in his catalog. The right place to meet him.

The arrival of the most technically gifted rapper of his era, armed with a cartoon-horror alter ego and a chip on his shoulder. Funny, vile and astonishing on a purely mechanical level, it made the whole world stop and listen to Detroit.

The record that fused rapping and singing, late-night regret and cavernous production into the dominant pop-rap mode of the 2010s. Love it or resent it, almost everything that has charted since owes it something.

No features, no filler, no compromises: a self-produced coming-of-age record that went platinum on word of mouth alone. It is the modern fan's gateway drug, and the clearest proof that earnest still sells.