It's the perfect time to celebrate the best hip hop albums and the best rap albums of all time. Last year hip hop reached the grand old age of 45. It began with a birthday party in the recreation room of an apartment building, 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, in the west Bronx, New York City, hosted by Clive Campbell, also known as DJ Kool Herc.

Today it's home to some of the most vital, culturally relevant music in the world.

And what better way to celebrate this most colourful, confrontational and controversial of musical artforms than by rounding up the definitive 35 greatest hip hop albums of all time...

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35. Lupe Fiasco - Food & Liquor

Hip hop isn’t short of the odd cocksure character or seven, and in Lupe Fiasco the most brazen of musical genres gained another confident young man upon the release of Food & Liquor. Fiasco’s debut album displayed the nous of a man wise beyond his 24 years. Reminiscent of Kanye West’s The College Dropout, there was a pop sheen to these urbane stories of sex and aspirational stardom. Two things Fiasco wouldn’t be short of from here on in.

34. Dead Prez - Let's Get Free

Upon release, Let’s Get Free was rightly acclaimed as a clarion call for righteous and political hip hop – not for nothing were the duo of stic.man and M-1 lauded as the most revolutionary rap outfit since Public Enemy. And while Let’s Get Free is a bombastic and unrepentant call to arms, there are lighter touches too, displaying that sometimes subtlety is just as powerful as an iron fist.

33. Scarface - The Fix

Not many musicians release their defining work seven albums in. Even less so in the frenetic world of hip hop where youthful bravado generally trumps maturity every time. But then Scarface is different. An astute businessman as well as recording artist, he knows his audience inside out, being able to give them what they want. And The Fix is the arch example of that. A lurid trip into the rags’n’riches lifestyle of hip hop hustlers, it’s a high octane ride from start to finish.

32. Jeru The Damaja – The Sun Rises In The East

There are few who can beat Jeru The Damaja when it comes to rhyming style. He’s clear, concise, his lyrics are bent to a beat and enunciated to perfection, sometimes pausing mid sentence to make sure you are listening. That’s because he really wants you to understand what he has to say. If ever there was a lyric that still resonates, it’s this one from D. Original: “Dirty, because of the skin I’m in, the fact I have melanin, automatically, makes me a felon”. And the album is packed with these; social commentary mixed with science and philosophy, tackling race and even misogyny which is a rare thing in hip hop. Then, again, Jeru is a rare thing as well.

31. Jurassic 5 - Jurassic 5

Those bored by the gangsta rap heyday of the mid-Nineties found much succor in the backpack underground sounds that began to emerge in the later part of that decade. Company Flow represented New York’s wild experimental edge, while on the other side of America, Jurassic 5, with their emphasis on turntablism, were all about recalling the likes of De La Soul. On Jayou, Concrete Schoolyard and Lesson 6: The Lecture, the six-piece pleasingly put a smile back on the face of hip hop.

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