The Golden Age

The sampler changes everything

The Golden Age begins when affordable samplers reached hip hop. Machines like the E-mu SP-1200, the Akai S950 and Roger Linn's Akai MPC60 let producers chop drums and loops from old records and rearrange them into something new. Marley Marl, working with the Juice Crew in Queens, showed how sampled drum hits could hit harder than any drum machine. Eric B. and Rakim's Paid in Full (1987) paired those loops with a new kind of MC: calm, complex and relentless.

Every lane at once

In a few short years, rap split into dozens of directions. Public Enemy and the Bomb Squad stacked noise, sirens and politics into It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Boogie Down Productions brought the Bronx back with Criminal Minded. The Native Tongues, De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest, brought jazz, humor and daisy-age warmth, and the Beastie Boys and the Dust Brothers built Paul's Boutique from hundreds of samples. Yo! MTV Raps and The Source, both launched in 1988, gave the culture national TV and a magazine of record.

The West and the South

N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton (1988) made Los Angeles gangsta rap impossible to ignore, and Too $hort built an independent empire in Oakland. In 1992, Dr. Dre's The Chronic introduced G-funk, with Moog whines and replayed P-Funk grooves, and Snoop Doggy Dogg's Doggystyle followed. Houston's Geto Boys and Atlanta's OutKast showed the South had its own voice, and the Bay's mobb music scene sold records independently out of car trunks.

The end of free sampling, and a final peak

In 1991, the Grand Upright v. Warner Bros. ruling against Biz Markie meant samples now had to be cleared, and the collage era faded. The age still went out on a high. 1993 and 1994 brought Wu-Tang Clan's Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), Nas's Illmatic, The Notorious B.I.G.'s Ready to Die and OutKast's Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, still some of the most celebrated records rap has made.