Onyx

It was the summer of 1991, and Fredro Starr, Big DS, and Suavé—friends who went to high school together in Jamaica, Queens—were in a traffic jam. The trio had formed a rap group, Onyx, and already gone through the record-company wringer—an ill-fated deal with Profile—but now found themselves idling only a few cars away from Jam Master Jay, the legendary DJ from Run-DMC. They struck up a conversation, and JMJ gave them two months to submit a demo to his label. But when DS and Suavé couldn’t make it to the final studio session before that deadline, Fredro’s cousin, Sticky Fingaz, picked up the slack. He joined the group, and Onyx joined the JMJ Records roster; by 1993, Onyx would be synonymous with hardcore hip-hop. Their debut album that year, Bacdafucup—like its major hit, “Slam”—is a classic of the genre: raw, brimming with aggression that was couched in humor but never softened by it. Onyx dominated this space through the ’90s, but actually picked up their pace of output in the late 2010s and early ’20s, flooding a new market with LPs that prove the most immutable energy never really ebbs.