Reasonable Doubt
1996
No label would sign him, so Jay-Z started his own with two friends and sold the CDs out of the trunk of a car.
★ 8.0
Browse by time · year
1996
Showing 10 albums from 1996
Endtroducing.....
1996
Built entirely out of other people's records, on a single sampler, in the basement of a Sacramento record shop full of unsorted vinyl.
★ 7.6
Odelay
1996
The Dust Brothers spent two years layering it out of junk-shop records. The dog on the cover is a Komondor caught mid-jump.
★ 7.5
All Eyez on Me
1996
Recorded in a hurry after Suge Knight bailed him out of prison, hip hop's first great double album. He was dead within the year.
★ 7.1
ATLiens
1996
André 3000 had stopped drinking and eating meat, and the change shows: the record is cooler and stranger than anything Atlanta had made before.
★ 7.1
Pinkerton
1996
Named after a character in Madame Butterfly. It failed so badly that Rivers Cuomo disowned it for a decade before everyone decided it was great.
★ 6.0
The Score
1996
Recorded in a basement studio in New Jersey for about a hundred thousand dollars, and Killing Me Softly was a Roberta Flack hit from 1973.
★ 5.9
Being There
1996
Singer Jeff Tweedy asked the label to sell the double album at single-album price and took the royalty cut himself so people could afford it.
★ 5.1
Ridin' Dirty
1996
There were no singles and no videos, and it sold on word of mouth across the South while nobody in New York noticed.
★ 4.9
Sublime
1996
Bradley Nowell's dalmatian appears on the cover and in half the songs. He died two months before the record came out.
★ 4.3