71. Bossman - Law & Order
(Double Down Entertainment/1Up Productions, 2004)
When this album dropped, I was still just kinda dipping my toe in the Baltimore hip hop scene, checking for a handful of artists I knew of, and this was the first record that really felt like an event in the city and lived up to the hype and really inspired me to delve into the scene more deeply. In the 5 years since, Bossman had one major deal that went nowhere, then got another and is still waiting on a big national debut, and has released a ton of good mixtape material and a few great singles (and a few really bad ones), but in my mind he’ll probably never top this album. “Off The Record” and “Dat Night” are incredible songs.

72. Brendan Benson - Lapalco
(Startime International, 2002)
Brendan Benson’s 1996 debut One Mississippi was the kind of D.O.A. major label alt-rock album that probably ended up with more units in used bins than in paying customers’ record collections, which is the kind of thing that might understandably leave a musician moping around for 6 years before releasing a more subdued sophomore album. And while Lapalco doesn’t have the lightening in a bottle power pop energy of its predecessor, it’s nonetheless a relentlessly tuneful and strangely cozy album that I played the shit out of in college at a time when I wasn’t buying a lot of new albums and really valued the ones I did hear more.

73. Prodigy - Return Of The Mac
(Koch Records, 2007)
The second half of this decade saw a mass purging of ‘90s rap icons from the major label rosters and willing or unwilling exiles to independent labels like Koch that were still happy to release their music to a remaining cult audience. Some of them faltered without major label budgets, some of them just survived, but now and again someone like Prodigy that everyone had already written off as too far gone managed to thrive, turning out a terse little 40-minute masterpiece of paranoia and tough talk with Alchemist behind the boards.



74. Grand Buffet - Cigarette Beach EP
(no label, 2002)
The difference between Grand Buffet's surreal, hook-filled and surprisingly subtle brand of dorky white guys making underground hip hop and the whole world out there of corny 'nerd rap' is something that I'll probably never be able to convince a lot of people of. In fact, besides the people I know from Baltimore who became part of the Pittsburgh duo's strangely huge Baltimore following back when they started playing shows here constantly 6-8 years ago, I don't know if there's anyone I can talk to about Grand Buffet without sounding like some kind of ironic indie rap dickhead. But I'm just saying, these guys are geniuses, and I became fully convinced of that right around the time they dropped the second EP of their 'Trilogy of Terror.' "Nate Kukla's History Of Lemonade" sums up almost everything I love about these guys in 2 minutes and 16 seconds.

75. The New Pornographers - Mass Romantic
(Mint Records, 2000)
The beginning of the decade was the last time I really made any effort keeping up with indie as if it was a proper genre with significant mandatory artists that everyone needs to hear in order to follow like pop music, before I just said fuck it and kind of went down a more personal path of stuff I actually felt a connection with. But in that time where I half-assedly got on Napster and downloaded shit that just wasn’t my bag like De Stijl because I’d heard good things about it, the handful of songs I got from this album, particularly “The Body Says No,” always stuck with me, even though I never really followed up and got the whole album until fairly recently, and it’s pretty awesome.

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