It’s high time that we devote one of these playlist features to perhaps the most important era in hip hop’s history, its Golden Age. Centered on the East Coast and spanning the mid-80s to the early-90s, the golden age of hip hop was a time of creative innovation, intensifying social consciousness, and stylistic legitimization thanks in large part to a predominantly unbridled, “Wild West” attitude toward sampling. Certainly by the early ’90s, when recording artists began being taken to court over uncleared samples, hip hop was seen all across the US as a legitimate institution and form of artistic expression.

This set that runs nearly two hours is a journey through the diverse hip hop landscape of the time, remaining exciting and fun to this day. Enjoy! And don’t despair if we left out anything — as the title suggests, we’ll probably be down to make another one somewhere down the line.