u/dweeb93

This is somewhat anecdotal, but has anyone noticed that Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar are by far the most popular rap artists among music nerds and critics?

The website Best Ever Albums compiles user lists and critics lists to determine the greatest albums of all time, and they also have a list of greatest artists based on their performance on the albums list.

Both Kanye and Kendrick are in the top 20, and no other rap artists appear in the top 100.

I'm just curious about this discrepancy. Eminem used to be loved among both critics and the general public but his stock has fallen in recent years. Jay-Z is rated high by establishment critics but less so among music nerds. Public Enemy, Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys used to be rated highly by Rolling Stone and the like but less so now.

Do you have any thoughts or opinions as to why these two are so far ahead?

If you define country music as beginning in the late 1920s and early 1930s with Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family and rock and roll as beginning with Chuck Berry and Little Richard in the 1950s, country music is way older than rock yet it still endures as a mainstream format the way rock hasn't?

She unfollowed her boyfriend on Instagram and I'm freaking out. I would rather she stay with him then for her to find someone new and have the cycle of pain start all over again. Please help calm me down.

Some of you may be too young to remember, but for a good 15-16 years Dr. Dre's Detox was one of the most hyped records of all time. He wanted it to be the most advanced hip-hop album ever, and it would have followed The Chronic and 2001 which were two of the most acclaimed and commercially successful hip-hop albums of all time.

It took so long to release that it was compared to Chinese Democracy by Guns N Roses, another record which was supposed to represent the future of music and took 15 years to make. In the end it was released to little fanfare, and though Axl and the reformed Guns N Roses do perform some of those songs live, no one likes it like they do their original records.

Dr. Dre eventually announced in 2015 that he had scrapped Detox and instead released Compton which tied in with the N.W.A. biopic and it had decent reviews and first week sales but has been largely forgotten now.

I guess what I'm asking is was Detox too ambitious to ever live up to the hype? Would it have sank without a trace like Compton? Are albums like Chinese Democracy, Detox and Smile even possible to be as good as their creators envisioned?