My 100 Favorite Hip-Hop Beats Ever
Nod ya head and break ya neck
I started playing the drums back in high school, when my local youth services center suddenly and unexpectedly got a drum set, an electric guitar, a bass guitar, amps, and music recording equipment. As a lifelong music nerd, this was a dream come true; I could finally make something of my own (in my mind, playing in the school band didn’t count).
I never had much desire to play the guitar. My hands just don’t bend that way, and my carpal tunnels have been a disaster since long before I got diagnosed. But I always had rhythm. And that drum set was calling to me.
A few of the other kids who hung out at that youth center played the guitar, but I didn’t have much in common musically with them. I didn’t listen to emo or punk or really much rock at all, save for Linkin Park, who I didn’t even know about until their mash-up album with Jay-Z, or songs by Living Colour, a band none of my peers had even heard of.
Instead, I was inspired by the breakbeats sampled on old hip-hop records, as well as Questlove, the drummer and front man for my favorite band, The Roots. The afro I was rocking at the time was meant to evoke Ben Wallace more than the hip-hop icon, but it was obvious to the guy running the music program that I wanted to drum like him and I would try to evoke his style when I jammed with my friends.
Eventually, I moved and I went a solid 15 years without picking up drumsticks, until a few months ago when a friend (we’re dating now, lol) invited me to a music studio to jam. She’d play the bass and I’d be on the drums, knocking off the rust. In preparation, we made a collaborative playlist of iconic hip-hop basslines, a good starting point for someone with my musical sensibilities.
But that playlist, which I overstuffed with some of my favorite instrumentals ever got me thinking about the great producers that made some of my all-time favorites, beats that get me nodding my head and scrunching up my face even after hearing them hundreds and hundreds of times.
So, I got into one of those obsessive modes I get into and started working away at figuring out what my 50 favorite beats of all-time are. It took zero time to hit 40-plus tracks and it became immediately clear that the list needed to be 100-deep.
Unlike my year-end playlists, this isn’t sequenced in any particular order. It’s completely fine to have it on shuffle, even if the transition from, say, Respiration to Don’t Die might be a little jarring.
There’s some real variety in here, from club bangers, to gritty street music, to gospel-inflected and slow-paced, to space-age futurism. One of the things I love the most about the genre is how different the things that make a beat great can be — some, like Devil In a New Dress, are elaborate, elegant arrangements, and some, like Shutterbug, have ties to other genres of Black music, and others, like Nutmeg, are built around one truly great sound.
The songs on the playlist also span almost 40 years of hip-hop, although I was shocked that nothing before the late 80s made it.
It’s no great surprise that many of the greatest producers of all time are on here, some multiple times. Pete Rock, Kanye West, Q-Tip, DJ Premier, Manny Fresh, J Dilla, Jake One, Havoc, Lil’ Jon, The Alchemist, Timbaland, Organized Noize, The Neptunes (and Pharrell as a solo producer), Dr. Dre, El-P, Big K.R.I.T., and RZA all make multiple appearances on this playlist. The fact that some of them are not only on here multiple times as beatmakers, but are also legendary MCs, is truly incredible.
Anyway, enjoy the playlist. And get a good neck massage after. You’ll need it.