20 Of The Best One-Rapper Albums In Hip-Hop History

XXL StaffPublished: April 3, 2014

You guys loved our One-Producer Albums feature so much, that we decided to flip things on their heads and dive into some of the best albums of all time that only feature one rapper. Turns out, this one was a lot trickier; not only do most rappers feature at least one rapper as a guest—Biggie's Ready To Die only incorporated Method Man for "The What," while Nas' Illmatic grabbed AZ to help out on "Life's A Bitch"—but the remaining well skewed so deeply toward the earliest hip-hop albums that we had to modify our criteria to include albums that had some guests, as long as they weren't rapping alongside the primary artist.

What we found was, typically, skewed toward the early side of hip-hop—the Bridge Wars projects, early installments from Rakim and Scarface—but there has been a bit of a resurgence in the past few years of rappers aiming to tackle entire projects completely on their own, with Skyzoo, Brother Ali and Childish Gambino all jumping on board. We've also carried over one other piece of the criteria from our One-Producer Albums list—only one album per rapper could make the list.

So, without further ado, XXL presents 20 of the greatest albums of all time that feature one—and only one—rapper throughout the entire project. Let the words begin to fly. —Dan Rys and Layne Weiss

Previously: 20 Of The Best One-Producer Albums In Hip-Hop History