From Cool Kids to Kanye: Top 10 Hip-Hop Albums Of 2008

A couple of weeks ago, an expert on the Harry Potter series told an audience of high school kids how lucky they were to have this Big Shared Experience—these seven books and 41,000 words in common. What does Harry Potter have to do with hip-hop in 2008? In an age when many year-end lists should be subtitled “Ten More Albums You’ve Never Heard of and Will Never, Ever Hear,” plenty.

Technology has made the world smaller, and in response, we’ve found smaller and smaller worlds to inhabit. Think of a specific era—in some cases, a specific artist’s work from a specific era, or even a specific year—and someone, somewhere is re-creating those very sounds. Which is fine, and sometimes a lot of fun. It’s just that those folks who are still striving for the Big Shared Experience were the most interesting stories of the past year in hip-hop. They were the people who believed that hip-pop didn’t automatically equal T-Pain, or the real pain of automatic IQ loss.

There were several such moments in 2008.

See the Top 10 after the jump…