Last Friday it had been a long week at work and it was super gloomy outside. I decided listening to some would be the perfect way to jump start my Friday. The day before I had heard Kris Kross’ “Jump” on the radio and was thinking about how great 90s hip hop was. I think we can all agree that 90s hip hop was the best, and that at least for people my age if you say hip hop that is the music they’re thinking of. Since I was obviously at work on Friday morning, I just used Spotify radio to have it throw some at me. I wasn’t super happy with the results because it didn’t stick with 90s hip hop, but it was good enough for a little while that morning.

I still wanted a playlist of what at least for me were the definitive 90s hip hop songs though, so last weekend I put together my own Spotify playlist. I’m pretty sure every song on this list is from the 90s, though I won’t guarantee it because I didn’t bother confirming. There could be some late 80s or early 00s that slipped in. It was interesting to me in putting it together to think that all of it was from the 90s. I kept thinking some of it should have been from another decade. At least in my mind there is a clear delineation between stuff from groups like Kris Kross and Bel Biv Devoe and stuff from people like Nas and Jay-Z. It’s probably because there was a shift in the music itself between the first half of the decade and the second, but also because there was a big shift in my own life at the time. In the first half of the decade I was in middle school and high school and the last half of the decade I was away at college. The shift from high school to college obviously is a big demarkation in my mind and I can clearly pick out music from between the two times in my life.

So here’s the playlist I put together. Have some fun listening to some 90s hip hop, and let me know if I missed anything that should clearly be on this list.