Prince Paul, who produced some of the earliest skits to appear on rap albums and who delivered one of rap’s first concept albums in 1999 with A Prince Among Thieves, named his Top 5 concept albums during a recent interview with allhiphop.com.
“My #1 would have to be [Marvin Gaye’s] Hear, My Dear,” Prince Paul said during an interview with allhiphop.com. “I just thought that was brilliant, just the whole story behind that album. Super brilliant. That would have to be #1. I have to think of things that more-or-less affected me. Number two would have to be The Amazing Spider-Man [Beyond The Grave] on Buddha Records in 1972-73. The next one would have to be recently [Killer Mike and El-P’s] Run The Jewels. To me that’s a concept record, because they came out with personas of hardcore gangster guys and made songs based on that.”
Although Prince Paul did not name five albums initially, he was asked specifically about Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d. city.
“I think for a contemporary record that’s a really good concept album, because people don’t really do that no more,” Prince Paul said. “He didn’t really take it literally like some people do. [Public Enemy’s] It Takes A Nation Of Millions[To Hold Us Back] that’s a concept record because it’s all about black revolution. If we were to put that in order, it would be Kendrick Lamar last after It Takes A Nation Of Millions.”
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Prince Paul was a member of the rap group Stetsasonic, which was prominent in the 1980s and early 1990s and billed itself as “The Hip Hop Band.” Prince Paul then gained notoriety through his production work with De La Soul. The group’s 1989 album, 3 Feet High And Rising, is often considered the first rap album to feature skits.
In the allhiphop interview, Prince Paul says that he does not like skits. “When I made [those skits] it wasn’t with the intention of like, ‘Yeah, everybody’s going to follow.’ I was just trying to glue3 Feet High and Rising together. I was thinking all of these records are so awkward let me just find a way to piece them together, and then it became a staple for a second for Hip Hop albums. I’d skip past them like, ‘Oh god. Why did they put that on there?’”
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