31. Pitbull - M.I.A.M.I. (Money Is A Major Issue)
(TVT Records, 2004)
It’s funny to remember back when “Culo” dropped and how it was kind of confusing to see this Cuban rapper come out doing a song with Lil Jon over a reggaeton beat and not really having any idea what this guy was going for. With every subsequent single and guest appearance for the next year or so, though, it became quickly apparent that Pitbull was the best and most versatile rapper to come out of that whole mid-decade pop crunk movement, able to kill any beat from rap to reggaeton. For a while I thought he was destined for superstardom, then his next couple albums were kinda duds, then he came back pretty much out of nowhere this year to become the big new cheeseball dance pop rapper a la Flo Rida, which is a little depressing in its own way, but it’s good to see him still out there.

32. Nas - God’s Son
(Columbia Records, 2002)
It’s interesting to think now about Jay-Z’s “one hot album every ten year average” barb now, at the end of a decade in which Nas made 5 albums, none of which was even remotely Illmatic, but all of which have their strong points and their defenders (hell, I’ll even go to bat for Street’s Disciple as the second best of the bunch after this one). At the time I was a Jay partisan all the way, and it was really the one-two of “One Mic” and “Made You Look” that made me turn around and admit that Nas wasn’t completely out of good ideas, which God’s Son confirmed and then some. Was listening to this album the other day and “Get Down” is just incredible. But yeah, Pitbull was better than Nas, at least for a little while this decade.

33. Destroy All Nels Cline - Destroy All Nels Cline
(Atavistic Records, 2001)
Nels Cline’s long term projects as a bandleader, mainly the Nels Cline Trio in the ‘90s and the Nels Cline Singers in this decade, are usually power trios, foregrounding his brilliant guitar work while still letting the rhythm section carve out its own identity. But along the way, he’s formed a lot of interesting larger ensembles for albums like The Inkling and New Monastery: A View Into The Music Of Andrew Hill. And of those outfits, the one that I wish had stayed together as a continuing project and not just a one-off project the most was Destroy All Nels Cline, the sextet featuring four guitars (sometimes expanded to a septet with Zeena Parkins on electric harp) that whipped up perhaps the loudest, rowdiest wall of sound in Cline’s immense catalog, fleshing his compositions out with lush layers of strings that his various trios would just never be able to capture.

34. Ghostface Killah - Supreme Clientele
(Razor Sharp/Epic/Sony, 2000)
As I’ve said before, one of my big deficiencies as a white guy who listens to rap is that I’ve never been a huge huge Wu Tang fan, as much as I love a lot of Wu Tang music, so this is one of their canonical big records that I’d only even heard in the past year or two. And it’s kind of funny to think how many people peg something like this, that was released in January 2000 and just sounds so ‘90s, as the best rap album of the decade, but at the same time I can’t hate, it’s pretty dope.



35. Tim Trees - Dalton Vol. 1
(Bdamore Records, 2001)
As much Baltimore hip hop as I’ve devoured over the past few years, I may have yet to hear anything as consistently enjoyable and thoroughly Baltimore as the record that Tim Trees and Rod Lee moved a few thousand units of at the beginning of the decade off of local radio smashes like “Bank Roll” and “We Don’t Love ‘Em.” Trees has a slurry, heavily accented delivery and the production sometimes sounds cheap, or too tuned to club music to appeal to national audiences, but in my head I love to think about if this had blown up and been a big underground sensation in the No Limit/Cash Money era. I wish more rap records opened the way “Spit” does on this, with a few cavernous kick drum notes and then straight into a ridiculous double time flow.

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