Now that we’ve reached the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, we wanted to celebrate the greatest rappers of all time.
Ranking musicians is an impossible task, of course, because everyone brings their own criteria and preferences. For example, we recently tried to rank the greatest American rock bands, and we realized there was no perfect science.
Music isn’t like sports. There aren’t definitive stats we can mention in order to demonstrate why someone is better than someone else. Rap is so much more about the way something makes you feel, which makes it very hard to judge and quantify.
But we still did our best to try and answer some important questions.
How exactly does one define greatness? Is it your personal favorite rapper, or is it more based on accomplishments and influence? How much do we factor technical ability relative to storytelling? What weight is given to flow compared to popularity? We all had our own definitions so we had to really just trust our gut here.
What about collectives? Rap groups (e.g. Wu-Tang Clan, A Tribe Called Quest, The Beastie Boys, N.W.A., Public Enemy, Run D.M.C., Salt-N-Pepa, etc.) were excluded from this list. We will revisit this at a later date.
Here was our methodology: Our staff was allowed to cast ten votes for any rapper, dead or alive. We were asked to rank each rapper from No. 1 overall to No. 10 overall. Rappers that got first-place votes from a staffer received ten points, rappers that got second-place votes received nine points (and so on … until rappers that got tenth-place votes earned one).
We calculated the results and brought them to you, the reader. This article is, by nature, imperfect. This list missed a lot of the best rappers to ever touch a microphone.
Art is subjective, as we know. But this was the closest we could get our staff to at least sort of agreeing.
RELATED: Hip-hop’s 50th anniversary is the perfect time to celebrate how intertwined it is with sports
[affiliatewidget_deal1]