37 Hip Hop Albums That Helped Shape Our Lives As Millennials
By: James Teague
Music as we know it has played a huge role in all of our lives from childhood to adulthood. Anytime we can hear certain songs being played, the music triggers something in our brains to have us reminiscing back on a certain time period in our lives when that particular music played as our personal soundtrack. That’s one of the coolest things that I like so much about music.
There’s so much that music can do for us. It helps us feel seen when certain relatable subject matters are brought up in the music. It also helps us create those “real nigga” memories in our lives. It can even help us learn a history lesson through it’s samples of the original song from the original artist from back in the day. All of these things are the reason why I believe we all have our own personal music soundtracks to our lives.
There’s just certain albums and songs that will forever touch our hearts because of the role it played for us as we set out to live our lives and figure out who we are as people. I'm going to discuss each period of my life and introduce you to the albums that helped each period of my life.
THE ADOLESCENT YEARS
This is the beginning where everything all starts when I was brought into this crazy world. You have zero clue as to what’s really going on outside of your bubble with your family, friends, and kid activities. The music is around but it only plays in the background at first. But the more you hear certain songs/albums, the more your child ear gets very curious and wants to know what it is you're really listening to. And this is the beginning of everything. This was very early for me with hip-hop because it didn't entirely truly grab my attention but these albums helped really introduce me to the culture of hip-hop.
NAS - Stillmatic
Lauryn Hill - The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
Will Smith - Born to Reign
Michael Jackson - Dangerous
THE TEENAGE YEARS
Once you reach past the age of 12/13, we finally start dealing with puberty. We start thinking thoughts we never thought before. Doing certain things that we would never think we do. Discovering things and activities that we clearly had no business getting into. We don't really have an understanding about what's going on and the changes that's happening so we try our very best to express ourselves to our parents in many ways that they can understand what we’re saying.
Often other times, we start rebelling against our parents for the sake of wanting to hang out and experiencing life. As we are growing older, the role of hip-hop starts getting bigger and bigger. At this point, its becoming part of a lifestyle from the way we dress to the way we talk to our friends and the situations that we deal with in school and in the neighborhoods of our regional cities. These were the albums that helped me get through my teenage years as I was starting to hit puberty.
Jay-Z - The Dynasty-Roc La Familia 2000
Lupe Fiasco - Food & Liquor
Jay-Z - Reasonable Doubt
Fabolous - Real Talk
Young Jeezy - TM101
Outkast - ATLiens
Lupe Fiasco - The Cool
Lil Wayne - Carter 1 & 2
Jadakiss - Kiss of Death /The Last Kiss
Kanye West - College Dropout /Late Registration/ Graduation
Ludacris - Theater of the Mind
Notorious BIG - Ready to Die
2Pac - Better Dayz/ All Eyez on Me /Me Against the World
Eminem - The Eminem Show
THE COLLEGE YEARS
This is where life truly begins when leaving the nests and entering out into the world. We are finally living on our own and are beginning the journey of coming into yourselves. Some find themselves quicker while others it may take some more time and more living before they can become who they’re really supposed to become. This is a time to be alive. A time to live trial and error while fucking up. Living in your college phase is one of those times where you’ll have the complete freedom to take advantage of everything before adulthood and real life happens to you.
The music during this time period of your life plays a role in your coming of age story as you’re dealing with college problems, dating, sex, relationships, and living your life to the fullest. Especially if you went to an HBCU (I just had to throw it in there). I went to college during 2009-2013 at an HBCU in Louisiana and I will never forget all of the moments that helped shape me into who I am today. These are the albums that shaped me into who I was becoming.
Wiz Khalifa - Kush & OJ
J Cole - Friday Night Lights
Nipsey Hussle - The Marathon
Kendrick Lamar - Section 80
Drake - Take Care
Gucci Mane - The State vs Radric Davis
Jeezy- ™ 103
Future - Astronaut Status
2 Chainz - Tru Realigion
Kendrick Lamar - Good kid Maad City
Chief Keef - Finally Rich
King Louie - Showtime
Lil Reese - Don't Like
THE YOUNG ADULT YEARS
Congratulations you’ve reached the chapter of adulthood. This chapter is where you take everything that you have learned from being in college and begin applying it all to your living situations. Now we’re in the place where you're dealing with bills, car notes, etc. For some you might have already been living in adulthood even in college. Once you leave college this is where life truly begins. This is where you begin to learn and live in adulthood through trial and error.
You realize that everything that you thought about adulthood is not really what it seems. When we were younger we would always complain about the rules in the house and how our parents would always treat us like children. We would dream and count the days when we finally turn 18 and get out of the house. Then we finally got out of the house, out of college, and began living in the real world. Once we’re out here living, it finally hits us “What in the hell was we thinking?”
We finally started understanding why our parents were trying to tell us to enjoy being kids. Although we realize that the dream of adult life as a whole is bullshit, we still find a way to make it work for us. With a lot of us dealing with our first big adult jobs and the struggles we go through with figuring out what it is that we want to do with our lives, Hip-Hop once again plays a huge role in the different periods of our lives. Whether it's the highs of your job supporting your lifestyle or the lows of suddenly losing your jobs and realizing you cant live the same way you once did.
You mess around and depression and anxiety are knocking on your front door to rob you of your confidence. Now you're feeling like you're not the same person as you once were so now you're trying to rebuild your confidence back. Along the way on this journey of adulthood, most of the time your college friends follow you into adulthood whether its a group of y’all all living in the same city or you meet a new group of friends who remind you of your friends from college so y’all build off of that connection.
Adulthood honestly is what we make of it. We realize that a lot of these adults haven’t truly grown up for real. Sometimes it just hits you in your head like “damn we really are some big ass kids trying to dress ourselves up as adults.” Nobody truly has it together and that’s alright. In each of our phases of adulthood we transition into that next level which in turn helps us get closer towards where we truly want to be. And the music soundtracks around us helps us think back to those moments. Here are some of the main albums during my early years of adulthood that played a role or soundtrack to all the periods in my life.
YG - My Krazy Life
Drake - Nothing was The Same
Future - DS2
Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp a Butterfly
The Internet - Ego Death
Kendrick Lamar - DAMN
Drake - More Life
Nipsey Hussle - Victory Lap
Schoolboy Q - Oxymoron
Partynextdoor - PND 2
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