On Feb. 8, 2000, dead prez dropped their debut album, Let's Get Free. An urgent rallying call to Black folks across the Diaspora, the album was celebratory, cautionary, and demanding at once, and immediately established M1 and stic.man as dynamic voices in Hip-Hop.

Led by the instantly recognizable, brazen single, "Hip-Hop," with its deep distorted synths that immediately inspire thoughts of revolution, or at the very least, strenuous head-bobbing, stic and M1 were like a rush of fresh air. Refreshing, raw, and earnest in their delivery and perspective, they get right to it from the jump, weaving pan-Africanist ideologies with themes of Black liberation cultivated by Black thought leaders like Marcus Garvey, Robert F. Williams, Patrice Lumumba, Malcolm X, Assata Shakur, and others.

"If you a liar-liar, pants on fire, wolf-crier agent with a wire/I'm gonna know it when I play it," M-1, warns on the electric first verse. On the second verse, stic asks the question that's still relevant decades after his death and more than 20 years after the song's release: "Who shot Biggie Smalls? If we don't get them, they gon' get us all/I'm down for running up on them crackers in their city hall..." By the end of the verse, his question is simple: "You would rather have a Lexus or justice?/A dream or some substance?/A Bimmer, a necklace, or freedom?"

The rest of Let's Get Free doesn't stray from the themes presented on "Hip-Hop," which in the 20-plus years since its release, has become a Hip-Hop staple. From tracks like "I'm a African," to "They School," where they address everything from pan-Africanism to oppressive school systems and their dismay for white revisionist history, to "Animal in Man," a retelling of George Orwell's classic scathing political satire, Animal Farm, Let's Get Free is focused in its messaging.

“Our soundscape existed between really famous samples of people like The Last Poets and Gil-Scott Heron, music that comes from a people’s place,” M1 told ROCK THE BELLS last year. “The artists that were existing in that space and vibrating on our level were definitely Havoc and Prodigy of Mobb Deep. They were a little dark and came from left field with the production. They were street poets but abstract rhymesayers about how dark times could be. Then Wu-Tang, like RZA’s production and all their cryptic five percent, marital arts—it totally hit the mark with where stic and I were coming from. As revolutionaries, we didn’t move like musicians; we were moving more like activists because we felt like we had a mission."

Over two decades later, Let's Get Free remains a timeless record that still resonates.