Prince Paul, "A Prince Among Thieves" LP (1999)

[busyboy]

This classic hip hop concept album is as slept-on and forgotten as it gets. Prince Paul, legendary producer, put together a dozen guest artists to tell the story of the rise and fall of an up-and-coming MC named Tariq in the rap game. In doing so, Prince Paul created an amazing piece of work, which proves that a record filled with guest-spots can be a masterpiece, unlike recent examples have shown us.

Here is the promotional video that accompanied the album, summarizing the experiences the aforementioned rapper encounters along the way to success.

[jaxxalude]

It is, indeed, a very slept-on album. The reason why this record managed to become great even with a lot of guest spots it's because Prince Paul somehow managed to find some kind of focus in there and pass it on to the featured performers. A lot of guest-filled albums these days ends up being the sum of its parts and sound like two or three different albums were imagined but never finished and someone just cut and paste the results there. In here, it was as if Prince Paul acted as some sort of film director who managed to communicate his vision so effectively to his actors that they somehow got immersed in the whole spirit and deliver some damn fine performances as a result. And seeing that this was a conceptual album, it would be of the foremost importance that he achieved just that.
Other than that, it also helped that some of the musical ideas Prince Paul cooked were not only truly original and creative, but also tightly constructed and delivered. Maybe not a really groudbreaking album, but it certainly made a difference when faced through a hip-hop's 1999 landscape perspective.