Old heads, is it true Reasonable Doubt...

[Big Mel]

Reasonable Doubt crushes IWW though. I had the inverse reaction as gator king. Granted I was in New York, the greatest place in the world at the time.

 

[Big Mel]

Reasonable Doubt sold gold in its calendar year. Just in those terms alone it was as popular as

Mobb Deep
Any Wu solo
Redman


And Illmatic didn't sell gold in its initial calendar year.


So now the excuse will be that it wasn't knocked as heavily as Illmatic, which is also not true. I was there. Illmatic was more of an event though and a jumping off point for the great stuff to come outta NYC those next years.

 

[froggle]

Jay's just not that unique.He wasn't doing anything that Big, Nas/AZ/The Firm wasn't doing at the time.All that east coast centric/ Italian Mafioso/drug dealing/ materialistic rap was over saturated at the time.

Right but the argument would still stand that regardless if Jay was who he was today, people who grew up in that era and still listen to the music would still listen to that cd. The same goes for De La, Jeru, Nas, Ghostface etc. I don't hear anyone knocking Ghostface and he definitely wasn't on the radio or in the burbs where you cats lived like that.

 

[TLR Is Mental Poison]

I remember when Flex broke "Can I Live" on his radio show

I dont know about anyone else. But I was hooked from then on. I think I bought 2 copies of RD cause I lost one.

 

[mobbinfms]

the funny thing about these illmatic & reasonable doubt threads is that the same people that try to deny their status, are the same people that wont utter a world when an album like black moon's "enta da stage" is considered a classic(as it should be).

they just like to stress sales and such for jay & nas, I guess because they had big commercial success afterwards.

2 things for certain about reasonable doubt if jay never became a household name afterwards:
1.) nobody on these message boards would try to downplay its classic status.
2.) at the same time, one thing we can all agree on is that the media would prolly sweep reasonable doubt under the rug and not mention it anywhere near as much as they do. a lot of these commercial entities that give the album high rank wouldn't even know about the album, nor would they know about jay. so in that case, @Enchanted, yes the album does benefit from jay blowing up later and campaigning for it. it helps in that aspect.

but if you were into hip-hop for real-for real back then, you know reasonable doubt is a classic. also, some of these bigger name artists that keep getting mentioned in here, weren't getting as much props as jay within hip-hop. for example, the fugees dropped a great album and they were selling more records than everybody. but jay was getting more burn in the streets of the fugees own city/state than they were.

Dapping just for that Black Moon reference.

You know Paid in Full didn't go platinum until 1995? And cats got the nerve to call that shyt a classic...

 

[Cloud McFly]

Arguably the hottest album on the streets in 1996.

I believe you are from Detroit like me, if I'm not mistaken, so I can definitely cosign that. If the album was getting burn like that here, I can just imagine how much it was everywhere else.

A lot of these cats can try to act as if they know what they are talking when they say nobody had it, or he was just an afterthought that year, but the fact of the matter is he went gold on his debut on a independent in a year where many established artists dropped great albums.

People are just showing their lack of knowledge, young age, or flat out disdain for dude.

 

[Big Mel]

^^^^it sold 700k in 87 though.

 

[mobbinfms]

Same exact story I got.I'm from the west coast and I can honestly say I didn't know one nikka who had RD in their possession.He was just that dude from the Foxy Brown "Ain't No nikka" track.

I'm from the Bay and I bought it the same week Nas' shyt dropped.

 

[Big Mel]

I believe you are from Detroit like me, if I'm not mistaken, so I can definitely cosign that. If the album was getting burn like that here, I can just imagine how much it was everywhere else.

A lot of these cats can try to act as if they know what they are talking when they say nobody had it, or he was just an afterthought that year, but the fact of the matter is he went gold on his debut on a independent in a year where many established artists dropped great albums.

People are just showing their lack of knowledge, young age, or flat out disdain for dude.

I'm from New York but I listen to tons of D hip hop.

 

[mobbinfms]

^^^^it sold 700k in 87 though.

Come on Mel...I'm being facetious.

 

[Big Mel]

I know. But I just want the youngins to peep that number and bow.

 

[keon]

the funny thing about these illmatic & reasonable doubt threads is that the same people that try to deny their status, are the same people that wont utter a world when an album like black moon's "enta da stage" is considered a classic(as it should be).

umm, no..that album ain't a classic breh..and i bought that album IN 93..it has classic tracks like "how many m.c's, who got the props & buck'em down, the remixed version of "i gotcha opin" too, but overall its a 4 mic album at best

 

[Big Mel]

That album is classic. Not every classic is 5 mics.

 

[mobbinfms]

Reason I said Busta was because of it being a dope debut. that's all. And that's not a downplay at all because The Coming WAS dope.

The Enta Da Stage analogy is good in the fact that it was an album that became a classic even if it wasn't necessarily recognized as one at the time and became one over time. But Jay and his marketing adding the "extra" to cysing RD as a classic helped RD's "classic" status as well. I think @Gator Reloaded said it perfectly.

And it's not a knock on the album at all because it is an incredibly dope debut. It just wasn't the status cats made it out to be at that time.

Enta Da Stage was the shyt when it dropped. Buckshot was the man back then... That wasn't the basis of the analogy at all.

 

[Homeboy Runny-Ray]

Reason I said Busta was because of it being a dope debut. that's all. And that's not a downplay at all because The Coming WAS dope.

The Enta Da Stage analogy is good in the fact that it was an album that became a classic even if it wasn't necessarily recognized as one at the time and became one over time. But Jay and his marketing adding the "extra" to cysing RD as a classic helped RD's "classic" status as well. I think @Gator Reloaded said it perfectly.

And it's not a knock on the album at all because it is an incredibly dope debut. It just wasn't the status cats made it out to be at that time.

its is a downplay. yes, "the coming" was dope but reasonable doubt was great and was accepted as such in real-time.

what do you mean by becoming a classic over time? just about every classic became a classic over time. people generally weren't quick to call something a classic back then. that's some new jack stuff. that's why I said, reasonable doubt got the real-time love that most other classics got.

Another west coast co-sign. I remember telling my bro I was gonna buy reasonable doubt off the strength of dead pres, he hit me with the "don't waste your money on that album"

Jay was known, but I think vol 1 made him a "well known" mainstream rapper, and vol 2 made him a star...reasonable doubt he was basically like AZ, known in hip hop, was dope, but he wasn't the number one dude everyone was checking for - and depending on your region, it's not a knock on anyone who didn't really remember/know of dude in '97, there were simply too many big dogs and local shyt, especially in the bay. And RD didn't have the immediate cultural impact the illmatic did even tho they both weren't super commercially successful

I can rock with just about everything except the bolded. if you didn't know who jay was in '96-97, then you just weren't into rap like that. you had to be living under a rock.

I mean, I was only 3 in 1996 but

same nikkas will be in a thread like this
http://www.thecoli.com/threads/a-qu...ve-as-much-of-an-impact-as-people-say.151642/

Sayin Illmatic was poppin like that with excuses out the ass about it not selling, then flip it around and shyt on Jay saying his was nothin when going by popularity, Even though his sales/hits etc, all that is right on par with Nas

I vouched for both albums.

but illmatic's sales & singles were not on par with reasonable doubt. jay did better commercially.

I do feel like theres some sort of jay/nas e-rivalry going on with some of the people in both threads.