Anybody so pathetic to be checking twitter at 3 AM last night would have witnessed a minor blogger infight stemming from Passionoftheweiss.com’s Top 50 Rap Albums of the ’00’s series. According to the very narrow circle of rap critics polled, MF Doom, Ghostface and a bunch of white people are responsible for a great majority of this decade’s significant rap albums. I contributed to the list out of hopes of counterbalancing that sort of result. I guess I failed. But I’m also experiencing some minor deja vu here. (I used to run blogs like Juan Pierre.)

Below is my commentary on a “25 Best Rap Albums of All Time” blog meme spearheaded a few years ago by the same POW think tank. My own 25 albums list has been removed because it is immaterial. In fact after initially posting the list to XXL, I revised it dramatically several times. Nobody noticed. This resulted in fruitflies arguing against different iterations and missing the point completely. Which is usually what happens with these sort of lists. Arguments. The most useless lists aim to start them, the least successful ones fail to provoke anything else. This post originally ran at the other site on 4/23/07. I’d also like to direct readers to Roger Ebert’s recent take on the task of critical listmaking. (more…)