I am a Kendrick Lamar fan, but Kendrick Lamar fans are my new internet enemies. For the past few weeks I have been arguing with (and subsequently ignoring) angry supporters of the Los Angeles rapper, ever since he released his major label debut, good kid, m.A.A.d city, to nearly universal acclaim. This site gave it a 9.5, and I wrote a mostly positive review for Spin, in which I describe the album as exactly what it is: a very good project that was clearly put together with quite a bit of work and thought and passion and talent. However, I also suggested that it might not to prove to be an all-time classic, because that's a distinction that albums grow into with time and not something that can be determined in the week's worth of listening that we all had prior to its release. To Kendrick's most ardent fans, even suggesting such a thing was akin to treason. "Clearly you don't understand the complexity of the album or the value that it has in its artistic ability," commented one reader of my review. "A simple-minded, window-licker is what you are, sir. This is a generation defining album."

This is the way we talk about rap albums now-- we can't just enjoy them, we must anoint them. There are no more personal favorites, no lost masterpieces, no solid efforts, no promising-but-under-executed debuts. There are classics and then there is everything else. The word implies the highest level of craft and permanence, but too often rap listeners assume the latter in the presence of the former. Or vice versa [1]. These miscalculations are not only making it increasingly difficult to have rational conversations about rap, they're shifting the historical perceptions and actual execution of the genre.

It's difficult to pinpoint when exactly hip-hop's obsession with the classic and cohesive album began. For the majority of its 35-year existence, hip-hop has been consumed as a singles-oriented genre. Many of the first wave rap classics-- Raising Hell, Paid in Full, Criminal Minded-- are essentially tall stacks of hits padded out with filler like solo DJ cuts and mega-mixes. The themes were only connected by the artist's line of vision, the aesthetic consistencies likely defined by the limitations of whatever drum machines they had bought or borrowed. Even in the years that followed, albums like The Chronic, All Eyez on Me, and Get Rich or Die Tryin' became classics by sheer force of ubiquity, not nuance or connectivity.

When many people call good kid, m.A.A.d city a classic,

part of what they are unconsciously measuring is its Illmatic-ness*.*

In a recent interview on this site, Prince Paul, producer of De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising-- one of the earliest rap LPs that could be defined as album-oriented-- described its making as such: "Here's the basic formula we used to make that album: a deep record collection and a lot of laughing. Nothing more than that. People try to look into the psyche of it, like, 'You guys invented this.' We just followed our own inner voice."

This is not an uncommon sentiment amongst early rappers: I never even expected to be talking about this record today, we just made music to have fun. That changed once it was established that not just rap, but specific works within the genre, would have a permanent shelf life. Since then, achieving this status has become a top priority.

This was apparent by the release of Nas' 1994 debut, Illmatic. If it wasn't the first classic-by-design, it was certainly the most visible (and probably still is). Nas was a highly-buzzed-about serious young rapper making a very serious rap album about his very serious world. Along with a who's who of star producers, Nas was making a classic in the hope that it would be digested as a classic.

The critical world helped progress this agenda. In much the way the tastes of Rolling Stone critics of the 1960s and 70s helped outline the classic rock canon for decades that followed, the standards for classic rap formed at the point when rap criticism was at its most powerful-- the heyday of The Source magazine. In her April 1994 review of Illmatic, Source writer Shortie (now better known as radio personality Miss Info) called it "one of the best hip-hop albums I have ever heard" and gave it the magazine's perfect five mic rating. Nas wasn't the first artist to earn this score, but he was the first breakout solo artist to do so [2]. While introducing a making-of feature on the album that ran in the same issue-- an oral history of the immediate past-- Jon Schecter wrote, "This is the story of the building of a hip-hop classic." The piece made no mention of the magazine's own involvement in this act of legacy building.

The legend of Illmatic has snowballed in the years since, to where it's no longer just a rap classic, but the rap classic by which all rap classics are measured. And not just in qualitative terms. The closer an album comes to Illmatic's exact make and model of classic, the more likely it'll be accepted on the same level. When many people call good kid, m.A.A.d city a classic, part of what they are unconsciously measuring is its Illmatic-ness*.*

And while both albums have similarities-- heavy imagery, coming-of-age introspection-- this is a faulty barometer. Illmatic is an undeniable masterpiece, but it's also a pretty narrow one. Nas does a few specific things almost perfectly on the record, while selectively sidestepping a lot of the other things that great rap songs and albums can do and have done. For instance, Illmatic is almost never fun or funny, and it's generally more personal than political. It produced no major hits and today its songs don't exactly work as party starters in any room where listeners aren't already familiar with them. It's self-obsessed in a way: Nas tends to his own stressed mind with little concern for his present or future audience. I don't say this to take anything away from the album [3]. As time has shown, tunnel-vision introspection is precisely where Nas' talents have always thrived. But as a representative sampling of the genre, Illmatic only shows so much.

Classic albums write genre histories and, in rap's case,

they're supplying a somewhat unreliable one.

Nas' later-day rival Jay-Z also played a hand in the rise of rap's classic obsession. It was Jay (along with a few martyrs) who popularized the idea of legacy in hip-hop, shifting the end goal of from being the greatest rapper in a room or city or moment to being The Greatest Rapper in All of History Forever and Ever. His consensus Serious Rap Classics-- Reasonable Doubt and The Blueprint-- are definite classics-by-design, all relatively sensitive and somber and focused and "honest," but they figure strangely into his catalog.

Jay's a more adaptable rapper than Nas, so this sort of singularity doesn't necessarily suit him best. Certainly not from a commercial perspective-- well-received but scattershot and single-oriented affairs like Vol. 3... Life and Times of S. Carter or The Blueprint 3 have had far greater success than his canonical classics. But this part of why Jay is a great businessman-- he even makes artistry a branding decision. His long-term success seems directly tied to his willingness to play by a timeline close to the old filmmaker adage of one for me, one for them. Except in his case it's one for the ages, one for now.

The problem with playing this game is that it allows the legacy of individuals to eclipse the proper historical representation of the genre. Singles and mixtapes are too ephemeral-- there are no major corporations keeping these things on shelves. Classic albums measure which rappers are "important"-- and which are merely popular-- to the point where it's difficult to even sell catalog titles that aren't at the top of a very short list of approved standard bearers [4]. The albums that are called classics now will be the records that future generations reach back to when it comes time to find out what rap sounded like in this moment. Classic albums write genre histories and, in this case, they're supplying a somewhat unreliable one.

Think about recent history: When the riotous Lex Luger sound dominated hip-hop in '10 and '11, the rare album that properly illustrated this was Waka Flocka's Flockaveli [5]. (Rick Ross, the other artist popularizing this sound, mostly left his albums out in the Yacht Rap zone for the duration of the Luger run.) Most of the other records pushing this sound were loose one-off tracks on albums that we've already forgotten or mixtapes that will fall whenever Dat Piff inevitably crumbles. Similarly, we've yet to hear a full-length that properly represents the DJ Mustard/HBK/Ratchet sound that has been all the rage over the past 18 months. Instead of making the Mustard-produced megahit "Rack City" a conceptual centerpiece to his debut album, Tyga just awkwardly wedged it into a 70-minute sprawl of faux-epic Drake-lite introspection. And YG, one of the biggest stars at the heart of this movement, can't even get an album release date.

Or consider the erratic Philadelphia rapper Meek Mill. Though their goals and audiences only occasionally overlap, from a technical perspective, Kendrick and Meek are not too dissimilar. Both have mastered a highly virtuosic form of gnashed-teeth rap that's very effective in the service of catharsis. But, unlike Kendrick, Meek has also figured out how to make hits with this style. He has dabbled in more serious material-- his "Tony Story" is one of the finest narrative gangsta rap songs in recent memory-- but it was his more spastic and lively hits like "Rose Red" and "House Party", courtesy of Roc Nation producer Jahlil Beats, that propelled him from local street DVD freestyler to national rap star.

Those tracks and ones like them are completely absent on his major label debut, Dreams and Nightmares [6]. On it, Meek spits as well as he ever has, but he's doing it entirely on a drab bed of po-faced serious-rap sepia tones. The hooks are overblown and maudlin; Mary J. Blige comes through to moan about clipped wings and enemies. The beats drag endlessly, sometimes stumbling into full-on smooth-jazz territory, no doubt taking a cue (and some scraps) from his label head, Rick Ross [7]. The album never ever ends [8].

Meek didn't have to make this type of album, but I think he thought he did. Because he needed that classic debut. He thought he needed a Reasonable Doubt, when he probably needed something closer to a Hard Knock Life. Had he just continued to refine and mature his original aesthetic, instead of narrowing it, he almost certainly would've made a better album. Could it have been a classic? Maybe. I tend to believe that the qualitative aspects of a classic-- the ones not dictated by the great tastemaker called time-- should be measured by an artist's ability to perfect their own blueprint, not The Blueprint.

[1]Will you be listening to this years from now? is a common measuring stick in the endless twitter/message board/schoolyard/barbershop rap-canon debates. But why should that matter if we are listening to it today and loving it? We might all be dead before you get to prove your point about the album not being a permanent classic.

[2] Ice Cube's AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted had previously received the same rating, but that was coming off the N.W.A. buzz.

[3] Seriously, honestly, really, Illmatic is definitely totally completely a perfect classic album and deserving of every accolade it has ever gotten. The Source jumped the right gun. Everything is cool here, guys. Slowly back away from the send button on the "Pitchfork Sez Illmatic Needs More Jokes and Party Songs" Okayplayer message board post.

[4] The only time the peak of the canon expands is when it needs to make room for dead artists. People are still exploring the catalog of late rapper Big L, but they tend not revisit his still-living and once-equally-revered D.I.T.C. partners like Diamond D or Lord Finesse.

[5] For this and other reasons, Flockaveli is probably the only commercially available rap album of the past five years that I'd be comfortable calling a classic. I will not do this in the main body of this text, however, because I worry that it would provoke some readers to close the window immediately.

[6] Though if you buy the deluxe version of the album, it tacks on two bonus tracks that lean in this direction-- the Jahlil produced, Big Sean-assisted hit single "Burn" and the 2 Chainz collaboration "Freak Show". Bonus tracks have become the last refuge of party records on serious albums-- Drake's uncharacteristically joyful Bay Area homage "The Motto" and Tyga's equally ratchet "Make It Nasty" both suffered the same fate.

[7] Much like Jay, Ross' ubiquity in recent years seems closely tied to the fact that he is one of the few street rappers with a sustained interest in making album-oriented classics as well as the savvy to make them at the right moment.

[8] I have not heard anyone describe Dreams & Nightmares as a classic, but surely someone, somewhere, has. Everything is a classic to somebody, especially the albums that aim specifically for this status.