Diggin' Into Hip Hop Suckage (Part 4.5)

Maybe the guys at Ambrosia for Heads have figured out a better way of determining the question of which era was truly the best for hip hop.  They have been slogging their way through a crowd-vote-based bracket system pitting Greatest of All Time albums against each other, and have culled the pack down to their sweet 16.

I like this because the crowd can measure more of the intangibles.  Sure, it once again creates a small sample size of only 34 albums, but because they took the time to bracket them out by era, you get to see that the bracket results are made up of nine albums from the 90's, four from the 00's, and three from the 80's.  Which, unfortunately, completely runs afoul of my theory that the pre-1991 albums were the strong ones, and only after sampling was taken off the table did the music start to suck.

But maybe not.  First, two of the 90's albums in the list were released in 1991 (Death Certificate and Low End Theory, two of my votes for GOAT).  So that makes the score "Post-91" 7, "Pre-92" 5, 00's 4. Then, if you look at the margins of victory given to each of those albums from their round of 32 battles, you can see that three of the four 00's are the last place finishers, the ones with the slimmest of margins to take their battles.  Jay-Z's Blueprint only took 51%.  Only the Marshall Mathers LP had a dominant showing in the round of 32 out of those four albums from this century.  Which I think looks like those are the weakest of this group of 16 candidates, lending some credence to my theory that the more recent music is lame.

Also, note that, of the albums from the oughts in the list, they were released in 2000, 2000, 2001, and 2004.  No album from the past 12 years won a battle to be included in the discussion of the best rap albums of all time.  Again, not a definitive answer on the road to what makes new hip hop lame, but not a bad data point.