G.O.A.T. featuring James T. Smith: The Greatest of All Time (simply known as G.O.A.T.) is the eighth studio album by American rapperLL Cool J. Released September 12, 2000 on the Def Jam label, the album topped the US Billboard 200, the rapper's first to reach number one.
Background
The bulk of the album came about in 1999, when DJ Scratch handed LL a CD of six instrumentals. The submission of beats took place when Scratch first met LL in the studio, as both men were working on the song "Ill Bomb," for Funkmaster Flex and DJ Big Kap's album, The Tunnel (1999).[1]
G.O.A.T. received generally positive reviews. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the album received an average score of 73, based on 12 reviews.[3]Entertainment Weekly's Tom Sinclair noted that the album "finds the Queens-bred rapper in near top form. Talking trash, passing the mic to guests like DMX and Snoop Dogg, reeling off endlessly inventive boasts — he makes it all seem as easy as chillin’ on the boulevard on a hot summer night. The only downer is the creeping note of defensiveness, as though the old goat (who's all of 32) felt compelled to convince a new generation he's still relevant."[5]
Nathan Rabin from The A.V. Club found that "G.O.A.T. suffers from an unsure tone and a lack of thematic cohesion. Although a solid album by a gifted performer, it feels like the work of a rapper chasing trends instead of following his own path. That lack of vision makes the boast inherent in the title seem more hopelessly far-fetched than ever."[12] In her mixed review for AllMusic, editor Diana Potts wrote that G.O.A.T "disappoints. [...] The theme of L.L. as the older seducer who is better than the current man of a girlish temptress has been common through L.L.'s albums. It's like listening to the confessions of a horny 14-year-old teenage boy in the girl's locker room. Even with the help of popular rap acts like DMX and Redman, L.L. Cool J has made the same album he did once before, with no new twists."[4]
Chart performance
G.O.A.T. debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200, becoming his first album to do so.[13] It also reached number one on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart.[14] By 2004, the album had sold 818,000 copies in the United States.[15]
^STAFF, AllHipHop (May 29, 2006). "DJ Scratch: Face Off". allhiphop.com. Archived from the original on December 17, 2019. Retrieved December 17, 2019. Well that was basically through the Funk Master Flex [and Big Kap] project, The Tunnel Album. I gave a beat to Flex. It was the track 'Ill Bomb.' Flex put LL on it and he killed it. And that is one of my favorite songs out of my whole discography. I went to do the scratches on the song, and LL was there in the studio, and he asked me if I had any beats. I gave him a cd with six songs on it, and he picked all of them for the album.
