By Oliver Wang

A FEW WEEKS ago I was DJing a party and a young twentysomething came up to me to request "some old-school." I asked for clarification – after all, Run DMC and LL Cool J are considered old-school, but technically, they invented the new school. The response: "I don't know, some Tribe Called Quest or something." After gently picking my jaw from off the floor, I turned back to my crates and wondered to myself, "If Tribe is old-school, what does that make Kurtis Blow? In utero?"

This brief exchange illuminated the growing generation gap among rap fans but also flushed out just how immense and diverse hip-hop has become. Meanings and values I once assumed were universally shared now compose just one thread of thought in a patchwork of perspectives. You'd have to be a damn fool to try to tackle hip-hop head-on in any definitive kind of way.

Two years ago I agreed to take on a book project, a selective guide to hip-hop's most important albums. That project eventually evolved into Classic Material: The Hip-Hop Album Guide, released in May by ECW Press and currently crawling its way through bookstores nationally. I'm not sure what the hell I was thinking, but my first idea was to compile a guide to independent hip-hop 12-inches of the 1990s. At the time this seemed inspired, interesting, but then it occurred to me that only about seven people would likely want to read this book and most of them would want either a Japanese or a German translation. Scratch that.

The publisher politely suggested I consider creating a CD guide instead, and I noticed there were almost no other comparable books on the market. While rap CDs have been folded into larger rock and R&B guides, with the exception of The Rough Guide to Hip-Hop, there was no contemporary hip-hop album guide out there. Surely, if there was room for a subgenre of rap romance novels (you only wish that was a joke), there had to be a place to talk about the building blocks of hip-hop's legacy.

What's in a name?

Within the first few weeks of squaring things with ECW, I began to assemble a senior editorial staff who tirelessly helped with shaping the book's development. One of the first hurdles was coming up with a title. Hip-hop nerd that I am, my early suggestions included Critical Beatdown (an homage to the Ultramagnetic MCs' debut) and Dope on Plastic (the title from a late-'80s 12-inch by Uptown). After months of casual wrangling, we settled on Classic Material – it sounded clean, didn't jock the latest slang, and conveyed the idea behind the book: hip-hop's classic albums. Plus, geeks would know it was a Leaders of the New School song from the mid '90s.

No such geeks were on the payroll of ECW's marketing staff though – they initially thought the title didn't work because it didn't say "hip-hop" to them. This prompted the question of what a more "hip-hop" title would be ("Fresh Def Jams"?), but I was scared to ask. Some were even worried that consumers might think the book was about classical music ("We've secretly replaced your regular Mozart with special Mannie Fresh flavor crystals!"). In the end, thanks to lobbying from the editor and book designer, we got our title. Now all we needed to do was actually write the book.

Mo' music, mo' problems

The biggest initial challenge was simply picking the albums. I wanted full essays, not two-paragraph blurbs. I felt like longer, multipage pieces were more meaningful than 200-word summations – my alt-weekly heritage was showing – but the trade-off meant covering fewer albums. Along with my tireless senior editorial staff, we compiled a master list of well over 100 albums and then whittled it down to half that.

What became clear was the difficulty of evaluating all of the albums out there. Hip-hop today is far more diverse and complex than I could have ever imagined in my youth. In 1989 when De La Soul's 3 Ft. High and Rising first seduced me into a lifetime affair, the genre was still small enough that fans shared the same musical exposure. I remember the late, great KDAY-AM in Los Angeles playing songs like NWA's "Dopeman," Professor Griff's "Pawns in the Game," Boogie Down Productions' "Why Is That?," and Above the Law's "Murder Rap" in the same set. It felt perfectly natural to mix it up that way. East Coast/West Coast, mainstream/underground, etc., these terms meant little at a time when every new song or album represented bricks for a building no one had the final plans to.

Fifteen years later that monolith is far from completion, and it's become too massive to capture in a single field of vision. Rap music has broken off into more satellite states than Eastern Europe has, each subgenre big enough to support its own society and economy. Artists like Aesop Rock and MOP have tremendous underground followings, but their audiences don't necessarily overlap. There are entire communities of Southern rap fans whose local scenes are so prolific, they may never have to cross the Mason-Dixon line. And let's not forget that aforementioned generation gap.

In the end we tried to balance as many important elements as we could, including region, era, and scene. That meant we had essays on some critically acclaimed albums, such as Boogie Down Productions' Criminal Minded and Outkast's entire catalog, and also on less obvious choices, such as Freestyle Fellowship's To Whom It May Concern and Wyclef Jean's The Carnival.

Yet, hip-hop changes so swiftly that if we put together Classic Material today, instead of just a year ago, it'd probably look radically different. Maybe 50 Cent's runaway Get Rich or Die Tryin' would crash its way into the party – I know Missy Elliot's Supa Dupa Fly and Under Construction certainly would. Maybe Big Daddy Kane's blistering braggadocio on Long Live the Kane would seem more dated as the new-school era recedes further into the past. Before I embarked on this project, I would have been more confident in making concrete claims. Now, I realize that hip-hop is a slippery thing to try to wrap your mind around. I imagine what a second edition of our guide might look like, 10 years hence, but all of the pages I riffle through are wiped blank by an imagination that can't process the possibilities.

Across the map

Hip-hop is like that fidgety little kid who never stands still for photos. Any snapshot you try to take threatens to end up a little blurry, but that still shouldn't stop you from attempting the portrait. When I was caught up in the day-to-day details of writing and editing, I thought the process was the drudge work and the finished product was the reward. Now, with book in hand, I realize the real pleasure is less in the final print and more in the act of composition.

An early worry was whether or not the opinions expressed in the book would hold up over time, but I realize how moot that concern was. As my partner had to remind me, this is a "guide," which, at its most literal, means that it's pointing people in certain directions. I have no idea, for example, if Ernest Hardy's essay on Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde will eventually seem prescient or anachronistic. However, Hardy's suggestion that we view the group through the lens of black masculine insecurity and teenage angst is a brilliant conversation opener at the very least. That's what all of our essays are – opening statements in what promises to be a long conversation.