The other day an editor (not my editor at the Weekly) gave me an assignment I'm really not looking forward to. He wants his writers to put together their top 10 albums of the decade.

I started sifting through a decade's worth of CDs, or at least the ones I felt might qualify for such a list. When it came to hip-hop, I noticed this decade, more than any other, has seen a huge variety of styles. At the start of it we had Eminem and Nelly, decidedly different emcees, ruling the charts. We moved on to 50 Cent and Lil' Jon and then took a funky turn with Gnarls Barkley, all the while acts like Jay-Z seemed ever-present.

This got me to thinking about Connecticut hip-hop and how a decade of randomness uncannily parallels our own scene. While variety may be the spice of life, it's not the best way to build a scene, and Connecticut's scene seems to suffer from an eternal identity crisis.

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