Top 10 Compilation-Style Albums By Producers

Right now, two of the summer's most anticipated albums feature producers' names in the top-billed spot: Mike Will Made It's Ransom 2 and Clams Casino's 32 Levels. Most of the excitement hinges on the projects' star-studded guestlists (although we can't say a damn thing against Clammy Clams' three prior instrumental compilations), and as far as producer-led albums in hip hop go, that's usually been the case. First beginning in the late eighties with the game's first batch of superproducers, the "producer album" has proved to be a difficult art to master, especially for beatmakers who don't rap. Sure, you've got guys like Dr. Dre, El-P, J. Cole, and Kanye West who've had no problem producing entire projects for themselves and their friends, and plenty of producers who've made wildly successful full-project statements with one or two rappers at the helm, but the compilation-style approach, where the production is the only constant in the face of a revolving door of vocalists, is trickier.

More often than not, we've seen such projects face-plant, as was the case with Timbaland's awkward Shock Value series, but a few have shone through the chaos. We've selected the ten best "producer albums" from the past thirty years, with stipulations that include: at least ten different MCs, very few (if any) rapped vocals by the producers themselves, and no instrumental projects. Click ahead to get started. 

Since 2013, this Massachusetts superproducer has released one solo album per summer, and the reason Duck Down Music has supported this move is most likely due to the success of the project that kicked off that spree, Extended Play. Technically, it was Statik's fifth full-length project, but it's his first to reflect the greater influence he's had on East Coast boom bap since guys like Joey Bada$$ and Action Bronson took off with his help. Statik's prior releases act as great showcases for his local underground scene, but it's hard to stack that up alongside a tracklist that includes Raekwon, Black Thought, Mac Miller, Freddie Gibbs, Prodigy, Styles P, Bun B, Flatbush Zombies, and Talib Kweli. 

Despite the fact that Statik was producing one-off joints and full projects for MCs at the time of its release, Extended Play seems like a stockpile of his finest instrumentals-- the soulful "Bird's Eye View," the tough-as-nails "East Coast," the jazzy "Make Believe." He gets knocked for being a by-the-books classicist quite a bit, but this release showed that unlike most of his peers, Statik could've been just as big if he was doing this shit 20 years ago. 

It's tough to imagine a time when The Alc wasn't one of the most revered beatsmiths in the game, but before the Eminem tour DJ gig, before the Lil Wayne album placements, he was scraping together a career by working with the grittiest rappers in the country. By 2004, he'd notched collabs with enough big names (Prodigy, Nas, and Ghostface Killah, to name a few) to finance an album, and what he came up with still holds up today. Over the course of 19 tracks, Uncle Al soundtracks rhymes by roughnecks such as The Game, The LOX, M.O.P., Lloyd Banks, Mobb Deep, and even T.I.'s early group P$C. Rarely in this millennium has cratedigging produced such a strong batch of foreboding, street-level slappers. (Note: for some reason, Spotify doesn't list the rappers featured on this project). 

The first of a few mixtapes to appear on this list (let's face it, producers get album deals far too infrequently), Young Metro's 2013 coming out party paved the way for his current fame. All the early major players are there-- Gucci Mane, Future, OJ Da Juiceman, Young Thug, Bankroll Fresh-- and the tape even includes the track that birthed the now famous "Metro Boomin want some more!" tag (Thugger's "Some More"). Underrated bangers like "Maison Margiela," Ace Hood's "Disloyal," and Ca$h Out's amazing "Money Do" make 19 & Boomin a must-have for any fan of ATL rap, as well as an important moment in Metro's booming career. This tape has far more co-producers (DJ Spinz, TM88, Zaytoven, Sonny Digital, etc.) than any other one on this list, but that's just how ATL works these days.

Despite the fact that Harry Fraud's often cited as one of today's most unimpeachable talents behind the boards, his 2013 project Adrift often gets overlooked. By that point, dude had made in-roads with Taylor Gang, Coke Boys, A$AP Mob, Beast Coast, Maybach Music Group, and a whole host of other talents in both the underground (Danny Brown, Sir Michael Rocks) and mainstream (Pusha T, Mac Miller) realms, and he pulled out all of the stops here. With a guestlist as varied as that, you'd expect that Fraud would flit between styles on each track, but surprisingly, his sonic fingerprints are unmistakably all over every joint. You wouldn't mistake any of Adrift as somebody else's work, whether it's French Montana's lazy drawl or Kool G Rap's precise bark that sounds off on top of the beat. Spaced-out pysch is a sound that works for far more rappers than you'd initially expect-- all it took was Fraud showing us the way.

If you made a compilation of all of The Neptunes' best singles from their peak days, it'd obviously top the list. For a while there, nobody was on their level in terms of radio dominance and sonic adventurousness. When Pharrell and Chad Hugo did get together to make their first album, 2003's Clones, it didn't quite live up to peoples' colossal expectations, but it was also far from a total failure. One part compilation of what sound like B-sides to their popular collabs with stars like Busta Rhymes, Nelly, Jay Z, Ludacris, Snoop Dogg, and Ol Dirty Bastard, one part stopgap Clipse showcase between Lord Willin and Hell Hath No Fury, Clones is disjointed and weird. The album was a pop success, going number one and launching Pharrell and Jay's "Frontin" into the top five of the Billboard Hot 200, but it's rarely remembered as such. The missteps are hard to ignore-- putting Jadakiss on a dancehall track (??), two random and dated-sounding tracks by forgettable rock bands-- but as a document of Pharrell's first artistic crisis (the second of which occurred when he did "Happy" and "Move That Dope" a few months apart from each other), it's a fascinating illustration of how his mind was torn between pop success and N*E*R*D wackiness. 

Peanut Butter who, you ask? This oddly-monikered fellow is a DJ extraordinaire from San Jose who founded a label you may have heard of, Stones Throw, which has fostered one of the most successful underground scenes in the country. Before he oversaw the creation of Madlib' finest work, from Madvillainy to Quasimoto's The Unseen to the J Dilla collab Champion Sound, he was a humble cratedigger who traveled around NorCal to find the most promising of the region's unsung MCs. His 1999 album My Vinyl Weighs A Ton brings together underrated spitters like Planet Asia, Rasco, and Dave Dub, as well as Biz Markie and Madlib's first group The Lootpack, playing like the best open mic night you've ever attended. The lyricism is top-notch front-to-back, and the beats are PB Wolf's crowning achievement-- dusty, funky, and hard-knocking. Although scratching has largely gone out of fashion these days, you'd be remiss to not check out this album's "Tale Of Five Cities," a DJ battle featuring A-Trak, Cut Chemist, DJ Z-Trip, J-Rocc, Kid Koala, Rob Swift, and others, that's basically the "1 Train" of turntablism. 

Will Ransom 2 top its predecessor? It'll be tough, because the first installment was the perfect culmination of Mike Will's previous series, the Est. In 1989 tapes, in that it blew all of them out of the water. From the opening salvo of the booming "Paradise" all the way to the soft-focus xanax dream of Rich Homie Quan's closer, "Hasta Lauego," the Eardrummer president gave us a tour de force of his dominance, showing that he can do any of Atlanta's dominant styles better than his peers. As the best of these compilation-style projects all seem to do, Ransom brings established veterans and stunning up-and-comers together under the same roof and presents a producer's vision as the thread that connects them. Mike Will certainly explores a bevy of styles and employs wildly varied artists, but despite being a mixtape, Ransom is a ridiculously well-constructed whole (just check the seamless transition between Jace's "Fuck U Expect" and 2 Chainz's "Someone To Love"). A year and a half later, Mike Will has proven he's here to stay, and if he keeps delivering full-lengths with such attention to detail, he'll cement his place as a legend.

Mike Will Made It - Ransom

Unlike Mike Will-- with whom he used to be locked in a battle of hits-- DJ Mustard has significantly fallen off in the last few years. His debut album, 10 Summers, heralded the beginning of the end, perfectly illustrating the producer's main pitfall, the Khaled-style strategy of banking on the biggest names possible and haphazardly throwing them on tracks together with little regard for chemistry. But the project that preceded 2014's "Sumer of Mustard" (the period when his beats were inescapable) was something entirely different. The Ketchup mixtape may have a few recognizable out-of-town names (Tory Lanez, Dorrough, and Ca$h Out) but the rest of its cast are Cali natives, most from the underground. Kicking off with with a hard-as-fuck Lil Snupe intro, this 21-track outing now seems like Mustard's peak, the moment when his beats didn't all seem the same and his talent-scouting abilities trumped his desire for star power. What's more, Ketchup helped jump-start YG and Ty Dolla $ign's careers. His genius was the creation of ratchet, a style that soundtracks classic LA gangbanging records just as well as it does strip club bangers, and someday Ketchup will be looked at as the Nuggets compilation is for garage rock-- a scene-defining artifact. 

This is where the concept of the superproducer album began. Before Marley Marl, nobody behind the boards was a recognizable enough entity for record labels to bank on when it came to selling commercial projects, but as Notorious BIG's "Juicy" illustrates, everyone wanted to be Marley Marl in late-80s NYC. Founder of the Juice Crew, which included early pioneers such as Big Daddy Kane, Biz Markie, MC Shan, Kool G Rap, Masta Ace, Craig G, and Roxanne Shanté, Marl was its undisputed leader, the dominant force behind the posse's best tracks. Chief among those was "The Symphony," a track that basically invented the "posse cut," and was included on In Control, Volume 1, an album that basically invented the "producer album." Sure, a lot of the James Brown breaks and soul samples sound dated now, but you have to put yourself in the shoes of rap listeners at the time-- this shit was earth-shattering. Eventually overshadowed by the biggest hip hop album of 1988, NWA's Straight Outta Compton, In Control is nonetheless a flawless showcase of Marley's crew, and an important document in hip hop history. (Unfortunately, a complete version is hard to find these days, but this YouTube playlist has 9/10 of its tracks.)

Donuts is Dilla's true masterpiece, a game-changing beat tape constructed while the Detroit legend was on his deathbed, but The Shining, his second posthumous release, shows how dominant he could've been had he played by the rules in hip hop. In a way, it's kind of a succinct summary of every style and scene Dilla explored during his career. You've got the totally zonked-out distortion of the Busta Rhymes-assisted opener, the Soulquarian vibes of tracks featuring Common, D'Angelo and Dwele, the down-to-earth spitting of guys like Black Thought, Guilty Simpson, and MED, and the proto-FlyLo jazz-funk of solo closer "Won't Do." (Dilla does rap on the album, but only on a few tracks.) Nobody will ever be like this button-mashing wunderkind, and The Shining is the best illustration of how easily he pulled other artists into his orbit.