This article is classic

Malice and Pusha T can now sleep at night; after us crackas weren't playing fair jive (wait, he meant the record label?), their sophomore effort Hell Hath No Fury finally has a release date, and it's only fitting for the Clipse boys that the date is October 31st. I'm going to buy it, but I really hope it leaks earlier than that. I need something for the back-to-school season.

"Fuck 5, I want a hundred-and-eight mics" -Vordul Mega ("Iron Galaxy", The Cold Vein)

There's an intriguing anomaly in music that exists only in hip-hop. No, it's not the fascination with jewelry that only Liberace would have brandished. Nor is it the fact that it's the only genre of music where its artists are regularly murdered (Lindsay Lohan and Hilary Duff didn't have beef — their feud was low-fat, organic pork). And it's not the sad reality that few rappers continue making good music past their thirtieth birthdays. Rakim's 38 and we haven't heard much from him since the failed Oh My God project with Dr. Dre, and at 94 years old KRS-One should be thankful he doesn't need an oxygen tank while lecturing at universities. Alright, so there are a number of idiosyncrasies within hip-hop. But the one that bothers me most is hip-hop's obsession with the term "classic." And it needs to be deaded worse than hyphy and Pharrell's solo career.

It's annoying enough that anything pre-1992 is automatically labeled a "classic," but the term has been whored out to the point that it's lost any semblance of significance. Nowadays it's not an acknowledgement of musical achievement so much as a marketing gimmick intended to increase sales. The other day a friend of mine called Obie Trice's forthcoming Second Round's on Me a classic, and the damn thing hasn't even officially hit stores yet! For some reason people argue that OutKast has five classic albums and while The Marshall Mathers LP might represent Eminem at his artistic zenith, it's no classic. I can't go a week without internet nerds insisting that the upcoming MF Doom and Ghostface collaboration is going to be classic. That unreleased Biggie and Tupac song produced by Quincy Jones? Classic, man.

The word doesn't mean anything anymore. It's become so elastic there are "underground" classics (Dr. Octagonecologyst), "lyrical" classics (Soul on Ice, Resurrection) "production" classics like DJ Premier's philanthropous gift to weed carriers Lil' Dap & Melachi (the 1995 Group Home project, Livin' Proof), "old-school" classics, and even "instrumental" classics. Any niche you can think of has its own "classics." If an album doesn't entirely suck ass, it's labeled a classic. Either people's expectations have drastically lowered in the past few years or 50% of records these days are classics. That's just not possible, let alone plausible.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (that's right, become a university student and you gain access to invaluable tools like the OED for the low, low price of $7000 a year) a classic is "a work of the first rank and of acknowledged excellence." In short, a classic is a definitive work that serves as a standard that other works are judged against. For the dumb kids, it means it's fucking great. And it means that only a select number of records can be deemed classics. I've always subscribed to the theory that a classic falls into one of two categories (though find an example that doesn't fall into both, I dare you): they either innovate and influence or develop, refine, and polish established concepts into a consummate illustration of excellence. Most, if not all, so-called classics fulfill all these conditions, that's why they're called classics.

But why in hip-hop does this unhealthy infatuation run rampant? Hip-hop, more noticeably than a lot of music genres, evolves at warp speeds. Trends last days before they die off, rappers who are supposed to be the next big thing one minute are making lunch money by modeling part-time the next, and saviours of entire regions are built up then kicked to the smaller, label-for-rappers-that-don't-sell curb. The listeners who were nodding their heads to Run DMC and EPMD in the late 80's, if they're still listening to hip-hop at all, constantly bemoan the state of the genre. Hip-Hop Is Dead is just not the title of the upcoming Nas album; it's a lifestyle for some older heads. Take off the nostalgia-tinted sunglasses grandpa, and accept that some of your idols haven't made good music in over a decade. Rap changes, get over it. Trying to hold on to a bygone era by calling every old-school record classic won't bring the "golden age" back.

It's also an elitist thing. Stamp a classic label on something and it makes it seem like you actually know something about hip-hop. It used to be XXL and The Source defining what's classic and what's not; these days every shmuck with a computer and torrent-capabilities thinks they're an authority in music criticism. And even artists are calling their own albums classic. Slum Village recently titled a mixtape Prequel to a Classic (and their self-titled Slum Village was no such thing) and Rick Ross has announced his debut will be a classic. Rappers, you can't call your own album a classic — that's up for the fans, and the fans alone, to decide! And you can't go into the studio with the mindset of "I'm going to record a classic" because it doesn't work like that. If Eminem really doesn't have any classics, so what? Does that really make him any less of an emcee? There are artists who have been involved with classics that aren't half the emcee Slim Shady used to be. Does it really matter how many classics Redman has, or which one of Common's is "most classic?"

And then there's The Source, hip-hop's former bible, which is still trying to regain its legitimacy after giving Lil' Kim 5 mics and the controversy over the review of Little Brother's The Minstrel Show (Joshua "Fahiym" Ratcliffe gives it 5 mics, Raymond "Benzino" Scott goes on a power trip and downgrades the album to 4.5, with the intent on lowering it further to 4 mics). And what's with rappers influencing ratings magazines give? Kanye West whined and moaned until XXL rolled out the red carpet and appeased the man by re-rating his debut an XXL. What kind of credibility, and more importantly, what kind of integrity, does that show?

The last problem I have with the word "classic" is the practice of prematurely stamping albums as classics. If a classic is a timeless piece of music, an enduring part of an continuously evolving culture, before declaring an album a classic there needs to be a period of ingestion. A time of critical and personal distance from the work in question, to weed out casualties of hype and Stan-ism. Remember, Reasonable Doubt originally was given 4 mics. Time needs to pass in order to properly assess the impact, and, well, the general quality of an album. Perhaps that's why it takes me so many listens before I can sit down and review an album. Initial impressions are quite often entirely dissimilar from lasting ones — I can't recall how many times I've heard an album and wasn't immediately enthralled with it, only to come back months later and fall in love with it (this happened to me with Mobb Deep's The Infamous, among others). I don't think the word classic needs to be expunged from hip-hop vocabulary, just more cautiously used. Thesauruses exist for a reason, after all. As the famous truism goes, you can't always see clearly in the eye of the storm. And I'm not talking about that new Busta Rhymes song.

Oh, and Hell Hath No Fury? Shit's gonna be classic.