Nas has been called the second coming of Rakim

The argument

The case for Nas rests on the reception of Illmatic and on what that reception was actually recognising. With the album's release, rap enthusiasts hailed Nas as the second coming of Rakim, and proponents stress that the comparison was not simply a compliment about skill. It was a claim about lineage: Nas was being measured against the figure regarded as the God of rap, and the comparison was invited by the tone of the record as much as by the technique on it. What made the tone remarkable was its timing. Illmatic has much in common with 80s old school rap despite arriving in 1994, and proponents treat that as the central fact. Nas made an old school rap album in the golden age of hip-hop, at a point when the form had already moved on from the style he was working in. An artist who sounds like the era they belong to is a product of it; an artist who reconstructs a superseded style well enough to be mistaken for its best practitioner is doing something harder, because none of the advantages of a prevailing sound are available to him. The conclusion the argument draws from this is comparative and deliberately strong. He captured lightning in a bottle: he made a golden-age album that was better than anything the God of rap had ever made in the old school rap era, which is to say he surpassed the originator on the originator's own terms rather than on terms of his own choosing. Critical opinion has since treated Illmatic as the greatest hip-hop album of all time, a verdict consistent with that reading. If the measure of a rapper is what they achieved at their peak rather than the breadth of a catalogue, proponents argue, this is why Nas is the best rapper of all time.

Premises

Counter-arguments

While Nas was able to accomplish a great deal with the release of Illmatic--including being dubbed the second coming of Rakim--this does not make him the greatest rapper of all time. Rather, it demonstrates that he was able to improve on the groundwork that Rakim had already painstakingly laid. Nas should have instead focused more on creating his own voice.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] A nickname is a reception, not a ranking. Being hailed as the second coming of an earlier artist records enthusiasm at the moment of release and, read literally, places Nas within someone else's lineage — which is why the counter takes the phrase as praise for building on Rakim rather than for surpassing him. [Rejecting P2] "Surpassed anything the God of rap himself produced" is asserted, and it weighs one album against a career. "Captured lightning in a bottle" then concedes the point against the position, since a singular unrepeatable moment is a claim about one record rather than about the body of work on which a best-of-all-time judgement normally rests. [Rejecting C] The conclusion moves from one album's reception in 1994 to the top of an entire form. Even accepting Illmatic's stature, the premises say nothing about the three decades of work since, nor about the other artists the title would have to be argued against.