Five Most Disappointing Hip-Hop Albums of '09

I hate to focus on the negative, but I can't neglect some of the more disappointing releases of 2009. Most of these albums aren't bad, we all just had much higher expectations for them, here are the top 5:

#5 Kid Cudi - Man On The Moon

I don't know about you guys but I was really feeling A Kid Named Cudi. I love me some laid-back stoner rap, and that tape had a lot of it. "TGIF" was my shit, "Cudi Spazzin'" was my shit, along with "Cudi Get", and I even got down with "Day N' Nite" occasionally. So I had high expectations for Kid Cudi's debut, Man on the Moon: The End Of The Day. Unfortunately, what I got was some bullsh*t I later regretted paying for. It's not that the album was really that bad; it was just a lot more spacey and absent-minded than I had expected. You could call it a strong artistic decision, I call it a mediocre debut album.

#4 Asher Roth - Asleep In The Bread Aisle

Asher Roth's situation was essentially the same way. The Greenhouse Effect Mixtape, bomb. There was some major heat on that joint. I grew a liking for Asher, not because he really had any substantial lyrical content, but he's got a unique flow and he's pretty creative and kinda funny with his rhymes. Aside from maybe a couple songs, his debut was pretty damn bad. I'd much rather hear him drop verses over other people's beats. It's a shame all those co-signs were wasted.

#3 Jay Z - Blueprint 3

I didn't think BP3 was necessarily a bad album, our tremendous expectations for Jay put this one at number three on the list. Being that jigga man took the official spot as rap's ambassador this year, the standard set by the first three singles released ("DOA", "Run This Town", "Empire State of Mind"), plus the success of his two previous studio albums, we all assumed that this album would be astonishing. Unfortunately it didn't quite size up.

#2 Wale - Attention Deficit

Out of all the debut albums that dropped this year, Wale's Attention Deficit was undoubtedly the biggest disappointment. From Paint A Picture in '05 to Back To The Feature in '09, Wale struck nothing but gold with his mixtapes and built some of the biggest buzz of any artist out there. When he finally decided to drop a legit album though, it didn't transfer. Maybe we just had higher expectations for his album rather than his mixtapes; but even then, AD was a big let down.

#1 Rakim - The Seventh Seal

I really hate talking about this album. The God MC rarely disappoints but when it comes to his 3rd solo album and his first effort since 1999, there really isn't much to be said. The Seventh Seal was an overall bad release. Besides "Holy Are You", the first single that was pretty good and got us all syched up for a dope veteran rap album and "Satisfaction Guaranteed", which I still bump, all of the tracks are skippable.