Reception
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic | |
| Robert Christgau | (B) |
| The Daily Vault | A− |
| Los Angeles Times | |
| Music Hound | |
| Rhapsody | (favourable) |
| Rolling Stone | |
| The Source | |
| Virgin Encyclopedia | |
In 1998, the album was selected as one of The Source's 100 Best Rap Albums. In 1999, ego trip ranked it as the sixth best hip hop album released in 1988. In 1989, Spin chose it as the twentieth best album of 1988. Nas ranked the album as one of his 25 Favorite Albums.
It was certified as gold by the Recording Industry Association of America in 1989, and it remains as one of only two of Kane's albums to have sold over 500,000 copies. The other Big Daddy Kane album to reach gold status, It's a Big Daddy Thing, is the only album said to rival Long Live the Kane as the rapper's best album. Allmusic's Stanton Swihart contributes the positive reception of Long Live the Kane to Big Daddy Kane's versatility and personality:
| “ | Even though he spends a good 90% of the album boasting about his skills and abilities on the microphone, and cutting those of other MCs, Big Daddy Kane consistently proves himself a thrilling artist on his debut album, Long Live the Kane, one of the most appealing creations from the original new school of rap. This debut captures the Big Daddy Kane who rocked the house at hip-hop clubs and verbally cut up any and all comers in the late '80s with his articulate precision and locomotive power -- the Big Daddy Kane who became an underground legend, the Big Daddy Kane who had the sheer verbal facility and razor-clean dexterity to ambush any MC and exhilarate anyone who witnessed or heard him perform. There are missteps here, to be sure -- especially "The Day You're Mine," on which Kane casts himself as a loverman over a stilted drum machine and lackluster, cheesily seductive singing (offering a glimpse of the particular corner into which he would eventually paint himself). But there are also plenty of legitimate early hip-hop classics, none of which have lost an ounce of their power, and all of which serve as reminders of a time and era when hip-hop felt immediate, exciting, fresh, and a little bit dangerous (in the figurative, rather than literal, sense), and when hip-hop spawned commercial tastes of the moment rather than surrendering to them. Although his next album would be nearly the artistic equal of the debut -- and, in many ways, even bettered it -- Big Daddy Kane would never sound as compelling or as fresh as on this first effort. | ” |
Read more about this topic: Long Live The Kane
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“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)
“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)