A lot of the most innovative music of the time lived on mainstream rap albums, and a good deal of those albums have become relics of the CD era when albums were pressured by major labels to have a little bit of everything (the love songs, the radio songs, the street songs) rather than to be concise, Illmatic-style classics. In 2020, it's normal for mainstream rap albums to be among the most acclaimed albums of the year, but 20 years ago, that wasn't always the case. "I was listening to Jay-Z before you even knew who Jay-Z was, when he was with Jaz and the Originators back in '88." "A lot of people would come up to us and be like, 'Yeah, I hate Jay-Z, too.' I don't hate Jay-Z, I think he's dope," El told Pitchfork in 2002. Some fans and critics tried to paint the underground as more authentic than the mainstream, but even El-P himself didn't see it that way.
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Artists like Jay-Z and Eminem made the genre more popular than ever, as a new critically acclaimed rap underground started to take shape, led by artists like Deltron 3030, Madvillain, and El-P. The early 2000s were a crucial time for rap. Some of the classic 2000 albums have already celebrated their 20th anniversaries, and other early 2000s classics will be turning 20 before we know it, so we thought it'd be a good time to look back on some of the early 2000s rap albums that hold up especially well and still feel relevant and influential today.
![paul wall the peoples champ cd paul wall the peoples champ cd](http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/1/adg/covers/drt500/t580/t58070gexuw.jpg)
Music nostalgia tends to move in 20-year cycles, so it's no surprise that - following the '90s-rap revivalism of the 2010s - we're already seeing some early 2000s rap trends resurfacing in today's rap music.