yea that's a common opinion among rap fans so don't take my hostile tone personally but i really don't agree with it.
for starters, there is nothing about the word "greatest" that suggests any specific criteria that need to be considered. like industry influence and all that... that is an assumption being made right out of the gate which is unfounded.
"industry influence" in and of itself isn't even an objective criteria. it is a quality that you might make some reasonable arguments in favor of a rapper using other, more specific objective criteria. like album sales for instance would be a truly objective criteria. or the number of times you are sampled in another artist's song. or you could take a survey of rappers asking them who their biggest influence was, though that introduces some potential for error as most surveys do. but yea.. and that's just one of the possible criteria that people look to when judging who the 'g.o.a.t.' is. for some reason hip hop seems to produce a really strong groupthink mentality which makes people confuse consensus for objectivity.
and then, even with all that, all this relies on an initial subjective assumption that 'industry influence' is relevant to who the 'greatest' rapper is, along with the additional proposition 'industry influence' can be linked to the objective criteria mentioned above (album sales, samples, surveys, etc.). which some might not agree with... so we don't have a clear cut set of parameters to really work with. which is why i tend to take the view that at the end of the day all you can really do with lists like these is pick the 10 rappers you think are best for whatever reasons you hold as important. nothing wrong with arguing with people but i hate the argument from authority type approach.
sorry to preach at you. seen this **** so much on rapmusic.com that it gets to me a bit i guess.
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