The five worst follow-ups to classic rap albums
Every music fan has experienced it: your favourite artist has been on a hot streak, and a new LP release is scheduled, with a lot of buzz surrounding it, given how good the last few albums were.
But when it comes down to it, the new album doesn’t meet expectations. It is released into the world but fails to match the quality of the one that came before it, or, in more dramatic cases, it reveals itself to be genuinely terrible. It represents a major dip in quality compared to its predecessor.
The follow-up to a genuinely brilliant album is always going to face pressure to live up to the last one, and, more often than not, they fall short. That’s fair enough, but it becomes a really notable problem when the follow-up record is actively bad, which does happen from time to time.
In that spirit, here are five examples of rappers who, following the release of a great album, immediately followed it up with a dud. As the huge names on the list will demonstrate, this is a fate that can befall anyone, even some of the best rappers ever.
The five worst follow-ups to classic rap albums
5. Snoop Dogg – Da Game Is to Be Sold, Not to Be Told
Snoop Doggy Dogg, throughout the 1990s, was on a roll. His first album, Doggystyle, was unambiguously a classic, one of the most important works of G-funk ever, while its follow-up, Tha Doggfather, was something of a classic, too, albeit not in the same league as Doggystyle. But for album three, Da Game Is to Be Sold, Not to Be Told, it was time for Snoop to embrace some change.
The shift, unfortunately, didn’t entirely work out. Released in 1998, Da Game Is to Be Sold, Not to Be Told was the first of Snoop’s albums to be released by a label other than Death Row, plus it was his first as Snoop Dogg, as opposed to Snoop Doggy Dogg. But all of this change did little to imbue the record with life and, despite commercial success, its quality was widely considered to be a stark decline from what came before.
4. Gorillaz – The Fall
While Gorillaz aren’t straightforwardly a hip hop group, rapping has clearly always been core to the project’s musical identity. From the very beginning, the virtual band, led, in real life, by Damon Albarn, has collaborated with hip hop legends and, in doing so, produced some great albums. Their self-titled debut album famously featured Del the Funky Homosapien on the classic single ‘Clint Eastwood’, while the second album, Demon Days, arguably their best, featured Del La Soul, Roots Manuva, Bootie Brown from The Pharcyde and MF DOOM.
Gorillaz’s third album, Plastic Beach, featured rappers like Mos Def, De La Soul and Snoop Dogg, and, while it was broadly not held in the same regard as Demon Days, it was still a popular and interesting record. But for album number four, there was a drop-off, with The Fall arriving online in late 2010 and sounding, very much, like an off-the-cuff experiment. Created primarily on an iPad while Albarn was on tour, it was not an especially rigorous record, and it broke the succession of quality, rap-heavy albums that the virtual band had begun in the 2000s.
3. Kanye West – Vultures 1
Vultures 1 wasn’t a solo Ye record, as it was a part of his superduo project with Ty Dolla Sign. Their partnership, ¥$, dropped its debut album in 2024, meaning it served as the follow-up to his 2019 solo album Jesus Is King and 2021 effort Donda. These albums were very religious in character, with even the cursing toned down to a minimum; Vultures 1 was the antithesis of that approach.
Donda may not have been Ye’s best album, but it is a classic in its own way, and, compared to Vultures 1, it can seem like a masterpiece. The ¥$ record gets rid of the Christian themes and reintroduces swearing into the equation, while the lyrics, at times, demonstrate Ye’s more trollish instincts at their worst. A decline had been detectable in Ye’s output for a while by this stage, but Vultures 1 seemed to mark an acceleration.
2. Jay-Z – The Blueprint 2: The Gift & The Curse
The Blueprint, Jay-Z’s sixth album, which happened to be released on the same day as 9/11, is widely considered to be one of his best. It’s even thought of as one of hip hop’s best albums full stop, so clearly, there was a sense of expectation surrounding its follow-up and sequel, 2002’s The Blueprint 2: The Gift & The Curse.
While it would be unfair to assume a masterpiece album could be surpassed by the next one, The Blueprint 2 didn’t even get close to matching its predecessor. It runs for more than 108 minutes, which is a bit of a slog and means there’s a fair amount that feels like it should have been cut. Even Jay-Z himself has noted it as being among his worst efforts.
1. Eminem – Encore
Encore is perhaps the ultimate failure for an album that follows a classic. Eminem had been on quite the run since 1999’s The Slim Shady LP, with The Marshall Mathers LP following the year after that, and The Eminem Show coming two years after that. These were all critically acclaimed and hugely successful in terms of sales, and Eminem, from the outside, seemed to be invincible. But then came Encore.
Released in 2004, Encore was a doomed project. After several of its planned songs were leaked online, Em had to abandon them and rush some other tracks in there. That was far from ideal anyway, but making things worse was the fact that he was succumbing to addiction around the time. All of this led him to make an album with some truly horrendous songs on it, which, over the years, he has since expressed regret about.