Best Hip-Hop Songs of All Time
25 essential hip-hop songs of all time — from Illmatic and Ready to Die through Kendrick and Kanye, each linked to the album it came from. Hip-hop's history is really a string of production revolutions as much as a lineage of great rappers: the sample-heavy boom-bap of early-90s New York gave way to G-funk's synthesizer basslines on the West Coast, which gave way to the maximalist, sample-flip era of the 2000s, which gave way to the trap-influenced, streaming-native sound of the 2010s and beyond. Every song here comes from an album we'd tell you to own outright, not just stream — the difference between a great single and a great hip-hop album is usually the difference between a moment and a body of work, and this list is built around the latter.
Reviewed by Callum Ashworth, 247 Album Verdict · Last updated · How we rank
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Tap the artwork or "Listen" to find the track on Amazon Music; "Watch" opens a YouTube search; the song title or "Album" opens its album page. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases and sign-ups.
What's the single greatest hip-hop song of all time?
There's no single agreed answer — critics and fans split between records that changed the genre's direction (like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's "The Message", widely credited as hip-hop's first major socially conscious single) and records that simply had the biggest cultural impact. Our list favours songs that still sound essential today, not just the ones that charted highest at release.
Is this list ranked by influence, popularity, or personal opinion?
It's an editorial ranking based on lasting influence and craft, not a chart position or a crowd-sourced average. We favour songs that shaped the genre's direction or represent an artist's most essential work over songs that were simply the biggest commercial hits of their moment.
Why isn't a specific song I expected on this list?
This is a curated list of 25 songs, not an attempt at a definitive top 100 — plenty of genuinely great songs don't make a list this short. We link to genre and decade-specific song lists elsewhere on the site if you're looking for deeper cuts from a particular era.
What was the first hip-hop song ever released?
Hip-hop as a recorded genre traces back to late-1970s New York, with the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" (1979) widely credited as the first hip-hop single to reach a mass audience, though the culture itself existed as a live performance art for several years before any of it was recorded.
Does this list cover every era of hip-hop equally?
No — it spans the genre's full history from the late 1970s through the 2010s, but leans toward songs from the so-called golden age (roughly the late 1980s through the mid-1990s), when critics broadly agree the genre's lyrical and production sophistication first peaked. We have separate decade-specific lists, including one dedicated to 1990s hip-hop, if you want a narrower focus.
How do the buy links on this page work?
Each song links through to the full album it comes from, where you'll find our full review plus vinyl and CD buying links. We deliberately link to the album rather than a single-song purchase, since we're a site built around albums as complete listening experiences, not individual tracks.