As a protégé of the hugely popular EPMD, Reggie “Redman” Noble caused an immediate sensation on the duo’s 1990 track “Hardcore,” dropping a guest verse so impressively packed with attitude and alliteration that his skills seemed barely contained by his allotted sixteen bars.
 
Less immediately evident was the fact that the Newark MC was far more than just a fierce battle rapper. Leaning into the raucous side of his stoner imagination, Redman’s debut album, Whut? Thee Album, announced the arrival of one of hip-hop’s most entertaining personalities, an off-the-wall misfit whose merging of rhyme cipher tough talk, comic derangement, and self-deprecating slacker storytelling produced one of the genre’s most fully-realized first efforts.