Critical Beatdown - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

Allmusic editor Stanton Swihart praised the album's production as "forward-looking" and called it "an undeniable hip-hop classic one of the finest rap albums from the mid- to late-'80s 'new school' in hip-hop." He noted the "lyrical invention" of Kool Keith's and Ced-Gee's respective styles, adding that "Somewhere in the nexus between the two stylistic extremes, brilliant music emanated. Critical Beatdown maintains all its sharpness and every ounce of its power, and it has not aged one second since 1988." Trouser Press journalist Jeff Chang called it "an amazing debut" and complimented Kool Keith's "shifty rhyme patterns". Pitchfork Media's Alex Linhardt called it "a flawless album—one that stands tall today as one of Golden Age's most ageless," lauding Kool Keith's "lyrical ingenuity" and citing Ced-Gee as "the source of the album's most insane, digitalk-quantum gibberish, spouting lines hey should be studied in seminars alongside general relativity." Linhardt attributed its music's "surging psychosis" to DJ Moe Love's turntablism and Ced-Gee's dense funk sampling, particularly his arrangement of vocal samples, writing that they "are ingrained in the very fabric of the beat, concealed and crippled amidst the relentlessly fuzzing bass. And like most great rap albums, many of them come from the patron saint of yelps, James Brown, and flurry and flux with such abstraction and chaos that they make the beats feel deceptively fast-paced."

Melody Maker stated in a retrospective review, "full of scratch-tastic heavy beat, gold plated hip hop which manages to combine the minimalist ground-breaking Sugar Hill sounds with the show-no-mercy aural assault of the then-emerging Public Enemy." NME gave it a nine out of 10 rating and called it "a bona fide classic." Sputnikmusic's Louis Arp noted the group's sound as "developed solely around the sampler" and stated, "Critical Beatdown's notoriety as one of hip-hop's first copyright offenders is more than slightly impressive. The album unashamedly nicks from the common James Brown staples and then-popular drum breaks like Melvin Bliss' 'Synthetic Substitution' Those grooves, the lyrics and the all around unique feel of the album make for some innovating hip-hop." Arp commented that the album "marks a sign of hip-hop's early burgeoning creative maturity" and praised Ced-Gee's "method of chopping up samples, rather than simply looping them like most of his contemporaries did, essentially changed the way the producer approached the hip-hop beat," adding that "One could go so far to call these tracks as genre defining." Rolling Stone writer Peter Relic gave the album four out of five stars in a June 2004 review, citing it as the group's "quintessential release." Writing in The New Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004), journalist Kembrew McLeod gave Critical Beatdown four-and-a-half out of five stars and called it "a bona fide classic of hip-hop's 'golden age' of the late '80s and early '90s, an album that was mostly ignored at the time but whose reputation has grown exponentially in the years since."