The New Milleni 10

10. Who Is Jill Scott?

9. The Mouse & The Mask

8. Train Of Thought

7. Stankonia

6. Like Water For Chocolate

Think about it this way: Dilla, Kanye and Madlib are the only great producers to come on the scene, in earnest, after 2000. With that in mind, Like Water was, in essence then, the introduction of the millennium’s greatest producer -- Dilla -- and spittin’ over the tracks was, perhaps, the new millennium’s best emcee -- Common. Imagine if Premier’s grand entrance into the hop was with Big Daddy Kane and not Guru. Imagine the import of a BRAND NEW sound being utilized by one of that era's preeminent emcees. Imagine Dre coming out with no one but an 88-92 Cube spittin‘. Imagine Pete Rock’s coming out party, hosted by Pharoah
Monche or Q-Tip (no disrespect to CL, cause he's a monster). That's what the Like Water was.

Common may not be spittin’ as ill as he was on One Day It‘ll All Make Sense, but he became a better artist. Brolic called Like Water Common’s crowning achievement and it’s hard to argue against that.

First off, the album begins with some world-music sounding commotion, when moments later Dilla drops a hop track that you never heard before. Groove's like that didn't exist in hip-hop, not even with The Roots. And Comm comes on like "Yo wassup world, yo what's happenin?" He's -- on an essential level -- vibin‘. That so important.

After the “Time Travelin” intro, Quest and Poyser offer us a New Orleans march with Cajun organ chords and then Dilla drops the most bangin’ beat of the year: “Heat”. That snare is shuffling and the guitar is wa-wa'd out, so the riff sounds like it’s on a hallucinigen. And Comm is tellin you, this is "hot sh*t."

From there we got funky joints like “Funky For You” with Jilly and Bilal. That's a straight-up body mover. Bilal is also on Primo's “Sixth Sense“, which is a powerful song. There are breezy joints, like “A Film Called (Pimp)”, soul-hop, like “The Light”, storytelling with “Payback is a Grandmother”, and the social commentary of “A Song For Assata”, which features an has an inspired Cee-Lo. “Nag Champa” sums up the newness of the Dilla sound. It sets a mood. Hypnotic.

This album was an embryonic version of this new genre of black music in that it painted on so many different canvasses. At it roots, though, it was a hop album -- one that introduced one of the hop’s defining production voices and an album that saw an emcee’s emcee take a creative leap.

5. Supreme Clientele

4. Mama's Gun

3. The New Danger

2. Voodoo

1. Madvillainy