Eric B. & Rakim - Paid in Full

There is rap before Paid In Full and rap after it. Released in 1987, Eric B. & Rakim's debut arrived at a moment when most MCs were still shouting party rhymes in end-stopped couplets, and Rakim simply refused to do that. He rhymed internally, across bar lines, in a conversational register that made everything around it sound dated overnight.

"I Ain't No Joke" opens the record with the coldest possible introduction. "I Know You Got Soul" turns a Bobby Byrd break into the template a thousand producers would follow. "Move The Crowd" and "As The Rhyme Goes On" show Rakim working at a lower temperature than anyone had thought possible for a rapper trying to prove himself. And "Eric B. Is President," the pair's first single, remains the purest distillation of what they did: one loop, one voice, nothing else needed.

Marley Marl remixed two tracks, Patrick Adams and Elai Tubo engineered, and Herb Powers Jr. mastered. The sparseness is the point. Where later records added layers, this one leaves space around every element so that the rapping has nowhere to hide.

This 180-gram double LP reissue comes from the Back To Black series on Island and 4th & Broadway, pressed at GZ Media. A permanent fixture in any serious hip-hop shelf.