The 100 Best Rap Albums of All Time

If you’re within a certain age bracket, you’ll remember the news being delivered with grave certainty: The iPod is going to end the album as we know it. Yet for as many 99-cent songs as were purchased in the 2000s, anyone who spent time on that era’s file-sharing networks can verify that the LP was still the most important unit for music obsessives. And it has remained so—albums are the venue for the most niche and audacious creative projects; they remain the organizing principle for press cycles and stadium tours; no one has gold mp3s hanging on their studio walls.