This is a year where when people look at it they think nothing much happened outside of the East Coast beefs and the classics they produced but there was a lot of good slept on albums from this era and Nas wasnt the only one who made a comeback of sorts (Foxy Brown, Busta Rhymes)
Off the top of my head..
Jay-Z Blueprint
Stillmatic-Nas
Disposble Arts-Masta Ace
Black Trash; The Autobiography of Kirk Jones-Sticky Fingaz
Malpractice (fukk y'all this was still a good Redman album)-Red
Kiss the Game Goodbye-Jadakiss
The Reason-Beanie Siegel
The Realness-Mega
NERD-In Search of.. (For better or worse this influenced a lot of kids and younger artists today)
Iron Flag-Wu (Not that bad at all)
That Beatminerz album dropped that summer.
Broken Silence-Foxy (Imo still one of her best works)
9 Lives-AZ (No Aziatic, but it started to bring AZ back in a big way)
Tha Liks-XO Experience (another album that I think was good despite the commercial experiment)
Tha Wash Soundtrack
RZA-Bobby Digital 2
The Beatnuts Take it or Squeeze it
Ghostface-Bulletproof Wallets (Although I felt like the mix up in tracklisting's punished this album a bit)
De La Soul-Bionix vol 2
Busta Rhymes-Gensis (I think this brought Busta back in a big way)
Ludacris-Word of Mouf (speaks for itself)
UGK-Dirty Money (Possibly slept on outside of the South)
Erik Sermon-The Music album (That single was classic)
Training Day-Soundtrack
Adam F presents Khaos (Only UK heads will know this but this album was lowkey banging with Redman's Smash Smuthin and tracks with MOP)
Hi-Tek Hitekology
Depending on your persuasion you might have felt the albums like Fab's debut, Ja's Pain is Love, Trick Daddy's second mainstream album, TI's debut, Eve's second album, Nate Dogg's solo album, D-12's album, DMX's great depression, Mystikal's joint, Petey Pablo's and Fat Joe's JOSE album whch brought him into the mainstream.
All in all not a bad year and some gems were there. I think its fondly remembered because there was still a healthy Street and Backpack underground scene on the East Coast and this was a time when people were still buying CDs and thus you could value even an album that might have been a 3.5 but a strong 3.5