Who is the best rapper of all time?

Encyclopedia of Opinion

Question: Who is the best rapper of all time?
Position‹6 of 8›: Rakim is the best rapper
Argument: Rakim was the first great rapper

Rakim broke new ground in the golden age of hip hop with his unique style and flow. Other artists borrowed and developed this style for the next two decades.

The argument

Rakim was only 18 when he began his rap career, making his achievements even more astounding. He chose to focus on the lyrical quality of his songs, which made his art timeless. His music has influenced rappers for over two decades. His influence on other artists makes Rakim the greatest rapper of all time, because without him the styles of J. Cole, Kendrick Lamar, Jay Z, and NAS would be completely different. Rakim also has an incredible talent for crafting metaphors and flow. The way he delivers his lyrics is natural and at times he is able to rhyme words in the middle and at the end of lines. For these reasons, he is the greatest rapper of all time.

Premises

[P1]Rakim began his career at just 18 and focused on lyrical quality, giving his art a timeless character and influencing rappers for over two decades. [P2] Later greats like J. Cole, Kendrick Lamar, Jay Z, and Nas would sound completely different without him, and his talent for metaphor and natural, internal-and-end rhyme flow set him apart. [C] Rakim was the first great rapper and the best of all time.

Counter-arguments

While Rakim is one of the most influential rap artists of all time, this does not make him the best artist of all time. Rather, by providing future rappers with a template to follow, Rakim ensured that the rap genre would evolve and that other rappers could use this template to become better than Rakim himself.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Starting young and writing durable lyrics establishes accomplishment, not primacy: the premise is offered for the claim that Rakim was the first great rapper, which would need an account of the decade of recorded hip-hop preceding him rather than a description of his own qualities. [Rejecting P2] The influence argument proves less than it needs to, since supplying a template that later artists built on is compatible with those artists surpassing him — and internal rhyme and metaphor are craft attributes on which every rapper named in the question's other positions can also be assessed, so citing them does not settle a ranking.