Raekwon dissected his ten submissions to Rolling Stone‘s recent update to the 500 best albums of all-time list.
At the end of September, Rolling Stone relit the debate over the greatest albums of the last century with another update to their highly-contested top 500 list. Originally published in 2003 and updated in 2012, the list placed four albums by The Beatles in the top ten, triggering ruthless ridicule and relentless challenges for the better part of the last two decades. This year’s rehaul pulls from a broader and more diverse panel of artists, executives, and critics, than the last two rounds, and the result was an almost entirely reconfigured tower of superlative studio albums.
As one of the artists polled for the turn-of-the-decade update, Raekwon submitted his top picks, crowning Ghostface Killah‘s Supreme Clientele as the greatest album of all-time. In a breakdown of his top-ten list, The Chef describes sitting in on the creation of the 2000 sophomore solo outing from a fellow Wu-Tang cohort. “He carries books. He writes six lines, then he leaves it alone and goes to make a sandwich. He’ll come back, and if his vibe ain’t right, he’ll wait another day,” Rae recalls of Ghostface’s pacing during the Supreme Clientele sessions. Rae also applauds GFK’s beat selection and how the rapper challenged himself, describing the album as “Soul music mixed with heavy chaos.”
Elsewhere on the list, Rae ranks Eric B. & Rakim’s Paid in Full as his runner-up and Boogie Down Productions’ Criminal Minded as a sturdy third, filling out his top five with Wu-Tang’s 36 Chambers at fourth and The Notorious B.I.G.’s debut album, Ready to Die, in fifth.
You can read Raekwon’s full top-ten, along with some musings on each pick, via Rolling Stone. Outside of (or at least adjacent to) rap, Raekwon has a new memoir arriving in 2021 and he’s cutting checks for people to legally grow weed in their homes through the newly-launched start-up, CitizenGrown.