Round of 64: (21) Kendrick Lamar - Good Kid, MAAD City vs. (44) The Beatles - White Album Bracket • Page 4

Crazy week, my bad for not responding to this immediately. I get that and I've read countless positive reviews...I still just can't connect that praise with what I'm actually hearing, haha.

 

Read the paragraph again, you’re tangled up. In my comment you are the person in the deep end. I’m favorably referencing your depth of context

 

I mean Chance’s “The Big Day” will probably become a classic in its own right.

 

Where has anyone been tearing down the rest of the genre? There can be more than one classic album per genre or even in a given year.

 

Don't get me started on that one, the reverse of what happened with GKMC. Although he was getting a bit insufferable, so who cares

 

Didn't say it was happening here

 

Okay that was difficult to parse. Noted.

Again, I'll say though: I don't begrudge people for thinking London Calling or Armed Forces are classics in '79. I just hope some will also add Tusk and Christopher Cross and Midnight Magic to the list. I don't think people consider London Calling to be a classic just because they haven't heard much else from '79 (even if they haven't). I think they consider it a classic because they listen to it and think it's great, just like I do.

That's my big objection here. The assumption of why people think it's a great record. It's dismissive and it's gatekeeping.

 

I asked why! All I did was ask why!

 

I would agree that it is gatekeeping if I weren’t constantly trying to get people to actually listen to a wider variety of hip hop (for example in the threads that led up to this) rather than just listening to the same five albums because they happen to be the ones that pierced their indie rock bubbles for some reason

 

I mean the answer to this is always an Occam's Razor situation: because it has mass appeal. Because the songs work. Because people enjoy listening to it. Because I still randomly get "YAWK YAWK YAWK YAWK" and the chorus of "Swimming Pools" popping into my head at random times. It's never more complicated than that. There's no shadow cabal conspiracy.

I'm not even a massive superfan of this album. I think he lapped it with TPAB. But the appeal isn't a huge mystery.

 

This is not entirely true. It’s not a “shadowy cabal”, but in music media, there’s definitely the phenomenon of the “token rap album”. The reason that there are like two rap albums on an average list (often more or less the same on every list) in mainstream music media is not because those two are the only two rap albums that are about as good as all the non-rap albums on their lists. It just isn’t.

 

General music media obviously should be a lot more diverse. They also have token country and jazz albums every year, too. But there's usually a reason that one album breaks through. They don't throw darts at a wall.

 

Yeah but that reason is not just quality. There’s a lot of group think too. There are almost always albums as good as the mainstream (or indie-rock-leaning, or whatever you wanna call it) media consensus rap album that are somehow on (almost) no list except for dedicated rap media lists.

 

That being said, I think we’re as close to a consensus now as we will be. I definitely did not intend to fight with anyone.

 

Right but "good" is not always the same as accessible. And matter-of-factly, music that is more accessible is going to have more generalized appeal. It's the same reason Marquee Moon is a masterpiece but is never going to reach the same audience as Rumours the same year. Both nominally rock bands. But one style is clearly more suited to mainstream and crossover appeal. Kendrick played on everyone's nostalgic love for West Coast hip-hop and it gave him that mainstream cache.

 

I can see that (though I don’t think it is enough to fully explain the phenomenon personally). But none of that makes it a “classic” either, which brings us back to how this all started, so we should stop

 

Yeah those are all reasons why people like the album…not why it’s a “classic”

 

this feels like a pretty simple one to me where i think it's pretty safe/easy to call it a "classic" but that doesn't mean it's particularly "good"

 

I see what you did there

 

Lamar Magic. GKMC is one of the greatest Hip Hop Albums to date by the goat Kendrick.