First Grammy Award for Best Rap Album presented
At the 38th Annual Grammy Awards, Naughty by Nature's Poverty's Paradise wins the inaugural Best Rap Album category. The category had been added for the 1996 ceremony, seven years after the introduction of Best Rap Performance (1989) — an interval roughly tracking the time it took the Recording Academy to acknowledge that hip-hop produced LPs, not just singles.
Why it matters
February 28, 1996. At the 38th Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, the Recording Academy presented the first Grammy ever in the Best Rap Album category. The winner was Naughty by Nature, for Poverty's Paradise. The other nominees were 2Pac's Me Against the World, Skee-Lo's I Wish, the Pharcyde's Labcabincalifornia, and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony's E. 1999 Eternal. This is a frustrating part of the Grammy history. The Best Rap Performance category had existed since 1989 (DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince won the first one). The Recording Academy took seven years after that to admit that rap also produced album-shaped records. By the time Best Rap Album existed, the genre had had Paid in Full, It Takes a Nation of Millions, The Chronic, Doggystyle, Illmatic, Ready to Die, and All Eyez on Me. None of those won a Best Rap Album Grammy, because the category did not exist when they came out. The first one went to Poverty's Paradise. You can argue that is the wrong album to have won the inaugural award. You would be in good company arguing that.
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