It's 2017 and Stillmatic aint classic to me
Has a few classic songs , hella duds tho
GKMC is kendricks illmatic
TPAB and was his IWW
Damn was his Stillmatic
Metacritic scores for k.dot : Damn 99
Tpab: 96
GKMC: 91
Sec. 80: 86
Nas:
Illmatic:90Stillmatic: 69
Classic album amirte
It was written not even on there lol
Stillmatic was a huge record though
Keep in mind when you're looking at that 69 metacritic, its only has 12 reviews
Stillmatic by Nas
The only mediocre reviews it has are from non rap, white publications like Blender, Allmusic and Rolling Stone (Who gave Untitled and Hip Hop is Dead a 4/4 rating later...so make of that what you will)
It doesnt include the influential Hip Hop publications that still were the authority during that era
The album got 5 mics in the source which made Nas the only solo rapper to get 5 mics more than once, which had them scrambling to re-mic albums and not piss people off in January 2002
How metacritic choses to ignore the reviews of established black Hip Hop publications like the Source, Rap Pages and XXL kinda of lends flaw to Stillmatic's placement on that list.
The fact that they can't even compile reviews for It Was Written and that they dont have rankings for A LOT of important Hip Hop albums from the 80s to the early 00s shows that they ignore a lot of black music publications that laid the foundation. Classic albums only end up on metacritic if they are reissued and someone bothers to review them again.
But even
if you're someone who lends credence to metacritic then if you look at God's Son, Lost Tapes, Streets Disciple, Life is Good and Hip Hop is Dead, you'll see they have metacritcs of 80, 81, 80, 80 and 79 respectively. Why is that a big deal?
Ten Years of Metacritic: The Best Music of the Decade
Well that's basically saying those albums hover around the same ranking as Kanye's 2000s catalogue metacritic (Which averages just 81%) and if you look at the metacritic of the 2000s, Nas ranks above Jay-Z, Eminem and Ghostface and really his ranking is only below 80 that decade cause of Stillmatic's flawed aggregate and the polarizing Untitled (Which got 4.5 mics in the source but a poor review in Pitchfork, which a lot can be said of)
We also know that albums like Lost Tapes and Life is Good have been the classic XXL review, an authoratative Hip Hop publication (which Common and Clipse will tell you counts for something for your perception in the culture as Be and Hell Hath No Fury were helped a lot by those reviews before their release) and God Son was one of if not the album of the year of 2002 (Making it as far as Time Magazine's 10 best albums of the year in all of music)
Now granted that doesnt change Kendrick getting a 96 on his last 2 albums but that also tell us he's bigger than Kanye, Jay, Nas, Cube etc
Does it really feel like that already?
Problem with that is its almost the Rotten Tomatoes argument of how these aggregate sites now give extreme ratings to good and bad films in recent years because of how they score up reviews that dont give stars.
Either way, pro or anti metacritic, kinda shows Nas catalogue is pretty strong and has multiple classics.
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