I'm 25 now, got into hip-hop seriously after Stillmatic came out in 2001. I have a brother who's eight years older than me, so I was into the late-90s stuff, but I started pursuing it seriously own my own from 2002 -.

I was originally an underground head borne by the internet, so I was all about the underground stuff that championed consciousness and rejected whatever jiggy/bling shit was popular at the time. Some of the stuff still holds up now...some doesn't. Funny looking back at myself as a 13 year old buying The Cold Vein from Best Buy, but impressionable young minds can be molded by a lot of different things.

I feel like that whole scene cooled at around 2005/2006. It was a combination of the underground thing becoming mainstream via Kanye and associated acts and the "underground acts" one-note acts becoming stale. I just didn't feel as moved by a lot of their later projects as I did by the earlier ones even though they were preaching the same things. I was gonna start listing records but I can go on and on. I'll give one example of a record that didn't hold up...I listened to Soul Position - 8,000,000 Stories. The "serious" joints on the second-half of the album just don't hold up and...wait is this dude on an interlude talking about candy? What?

Going to college from 2006-2010, I naturally got into more mainstream stuff. I think Wayne's run from 05 (probably earlier but I didn't really get into him into Carter 2) until 2007 was historic. 2008 he was actually kind of wack but the Carter 3 album was great. From what I remember there wasn't too much great underground stuff at the time...I was really into Wayne, T.I., Luda, T-Pain, The-Dream...whatever was popular at the time. I thought (and still think) Drake's So Far Gone mixtape was really dope. The "new generation" didn't really come around until 2011, but you could see the seeds being planted in 2009 with the XXL Freshman list and Drake, Cudi, J. Cole, Charles Hamilton, etc... starting to make some noise.

Growing up via the internet, I was accustomed to the "canon" of classic 90s records like Illmatic, 36 Chambers, ATLiens, etc... but I've really started getting into earlier 90s hip-hop lately, especially with all the vinyl re-issues coming out. Digable Planets, De La Soul, Black Moon, Ice Cube, Goodie Mob, Organized Konfusion, Pharcyde, Souls of Michief...I always knew the names and knew their singles but I never got into their full albums until now. Objectively the 90s was better than the 00s for hip-hop. It's not even close.

TWENTY CLASSIC ALBUMS FROM THE 2000S:
- Supreme Clientele
- The Grind Date
- Disposable Arts
- The Cold Vein
- Murs 3:16
- College Dropout / Late Registration / Graduation (pick one)
- Mood Muzik 2
- The Listening
- Madvillainy
- Da Drought 3
- Underground Kingz
- Speakerboxxx / The Love Below
- Fantastic Vol. 2
- King
- The Black Album
- The Blueprint
- God's Son
- Diplomatic Immunity
- Only Built 4 Cuban Linx 2
- The Unseen

Impeccable/Notable Runs from the 2000s:
- Wayne from 2005ish - 2007 as mentioned above...simply unstoppable
- Doom from 2003 to 2004
- Andre in 2006/2007 when he was rapping over every mainstream song
- Eminem in late 2002/early 2003 in mixtape mode. I was never a big fan of G-Unit but between the Benzino diss songs, the 8 Mile stuff and the random mixtape stuff this was Em at his best IMO
- Madlib production-wise from Quasimoto to 2004 or so
- Cam'ron in this era: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugkjSxnzPDM

Sorry this was all off the top of the head - I'm sure I missed a lot