Jesse Frohman An amazing thing about listening to hip-hop in the late 1980s and early 1990s was the sense of infinite possibility. It seemed like every week, some new record came out that sounded like nothing you had ever heard before, and opened up some whole new territory you’d never even considered. The technology, the subject matter, and the audience were all shifting at warp speed; N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton, Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, and De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising all radically changed the direction of music, and they all came out within less than a year of each other.