'00s Hip-Hop

Aside from such rising rhyme slayers as Lil Wayne, Ludacris, and the one-stop shop that is Kanye West, the ’00s was dominated by the same rap dons as the decade before it. That goes for everyone from Jay-Z — the MC/mogul who hit yet another career high with the instant Big Apple anthem “Empire State of Mind” — to the G-funk-rooted family tree of Dr. Dre, including Eminem (the head-rush hooks of “Lose Yourself”), Snoop Dogg (the sleek, steam-pressed samples of “Drop It Like It’s Hot”), and a former gangbanger with the bullet holes to prove it (50 Cent, who coasts right across the feel-good grooves of “In da Club”).

From DMX to Drake, hip-hop’s greatest stars take it to our Next Steps.

If there’s one thing we’ve always loved about hip-hop, it’s how hungry its artists are; how flippin’ the script means turning two turntables and a microphone into a living, breathing art form. One group that changed the game throughout the ’00s was Dipset, the Harlem-bred collective that counts Cam’Ron (the spastic soul samples of “Oh Boy”), Jim Jones (the towering synth lines of “We Fly High”), and Juelz Santana (the whistle-blurting catcalls of “There It Go”) among its ranks. Speaking of battle-ready MCs, Busta Rhymes bumps into a Daft Punk chorus in “Touch It” and Jay-Z steamrolls a stack of synths in “Dirt Off Your Shoulder.”

And then there are our Deep Cuts, which drop most of the above in the same ring as Rick Ross and the Roots.

While the familiar flows of Jay-Z, Nas, and Busta Rhymes held the East Coast down in the ’00s, the Dirty South was having its greatest decade yet. Following the lead of Atlanta’s own dynamic duo, OutKast, T.I. imagined a future where Roberta Flack rubs elbows with “Hey Joe” (“What You Know”); Mike Jones clobbered a church organ and slowed the chorus of “Back Then” to a crawl; Gucci Mane ran laps around the steely loops of “Wasted”; and UGK delivered one of their final sizzurp-sipping singles, “Int’l Players Anthem (I Choose You),” against a Motown-driven backdrop and the cleanup-crew verses of Andre 3000 and Big Boi.

Now that we’re three decades into the ever-evolving history of hip-hop, the scene isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. If anything, it’s manhandled pop music itself, topping the charts year after year, thanks to such time-tested stars as Jay-Z, Dr. Dre, Busta Rhymes, OutKast, and Missy Elliott. Not to mention the new school that’s kept their skills sharper than a set of chef’s knives, from Lil Wayne to Young Jeezy, from 50 Cent to Rick Ross. Come to think of it, a platinum-plated producer even showed his rhyme-spitting side in the ’00s. You might have heard of him — a little-MC-that-could by the name of Kanye West, as heard in such early hits as “Gold Digger” and “Jesus Walks,” cuts that prove hip-hop’s going to rewrite the rules of Top 40 music for decades to come.