Reception
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic | |
| Pitchfork Media | 7.8/10.0 |
| Q | |
| Rhapsody | favorable |
| Robert Christgau | A+ |
| Rolling Stone | favorable |
| The Rolling Stone Album Guide | |
| RapReviews | |
| The Source | |
In 1998, the album was selected as one of The Source's 100 Best Rap Albums.
It is still the only album by a white hip-hop act to receive the coveted 5 mics from The Source.
In 2003, the album was ranked number 217 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
Vibe – Included in Vibe's 100 Essential Albums of the 20th Century.
Q – 4 stars – "Licensed to Ill remains the world's only punk rock rap album, arguably superior to Never Mind the Bollocks…knowing that apathy and slovenliness were just around the corner."
Melody Maker – Bloody Essential – "There's lots of self-reverential bragging, more tenuous rhymes than are usually permitted by law and, most importantly of all, an unshakably glorious celebration of being alive.… A surprisingly enduring classic."
In 2006, Q magazine placed the album at #16 in its list of "40 Best Albums of the '80s".
In 2012, Slant Magazine listed the album at #12 on its list of "Best Albums of the 1980s" saying "Rife with layer upon layer of sampling, start-stop transitions, and aggressive beats, it helped transform the genre from a direct dialogue between MC and DJ into a piercing, multi-threaded narrative" and "helped set an exciting template for the future".
Eminem said the album was one of his favorites of all time and said it changed hip hop.
Read more about this topic: Licensed To Ill
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)