The hip-hop release clock never stops. New music is constantly being pushed up, pushed back, re-released, and updated. However, at the end of the year it is always fun to look at what we were supposed to get in the year prior and speculate, based on industry rumors, what we will be getting in the following year.

This is my personal top ten hip-hop albums of the year. This is the one blatantly subjective article I will be making this year. I looked through every hip-hop release from this year and compiled a list of every album I had listened to. The list was shorter than I expected but still a lengthy one that made cutting down to ten pretty much impossible.

Album sales are not really the best metric for judging a person's level of success, and I am not about to try and dig through charities newsletters to find out who donated the most. However I feel confident in my ability to decide what artists had their stock rise the highest.

Today’s list was a particularly hard one to put together. All the other lists have much smaller fields of possible entrants so for me to narrow this year down to its ten best tracks and four honorable mentions was genuinely wreaking havoc on my brain. The other major issue with this list is finding the balance between objectivity and subjectivity.

This article is about to become immediately more controversial. This is not because of the placement of albums, the top three is pretty chalk, but because of my overall opinions on Eminem. I can, and in the future will, make a damn fantastic argument as to why Eminem is the greatest hip-hop artist of all time.

Kanye West is a hard figure to talk and write about. No matter where you land on the political and religious spectrum, he manages to alienate or inspire people of all beliefs though I do recognize it is mostly the former.