deemed it his best. According to Birchmeier, it differed from his subsequent albums by lacking "pop-crossover" songs and hits. Shaheem Reid of MTV explained, "Reasonable Doubt might not have the radio hits or club bangers of many of his other albums, but it may be Jay at his most lyrical—and certainly at his most honest, according to him". Huey said the lyrical appeal lied within Jay-Z's "effortless, unaffected cool" flow, and knack for "writing some of the most acrobatic rhymes heard in quite some time". According to Huey, this "helped Reasonable Doubt rank as one of the finest albums of New York's hip-hop renaissance of the '90s". Birchmeier, on the other hand, believed the superior quality of producers was more responsible for the album's reputation as a classic more so than Jay-Z. In a retrospective review for MSN Music, Robert Christgau said the album was "designed for the hip-hop cognoscenti and street aesthetes who still swear he never topped it," finding it "richer than any outsider could have known, and benefiting from everything we've since learned about the minor crack baron who put his money where his mouth was. You can hear him marshalling a discipline known to few rappers and many crack barons, and that asceticism undercuts the intrinsic delight of his rhymes". Legacy and influence Since its initial reception, Reasonable Doubt has received further acclaim from music critics and writers. According to Pitchforks Ryan Schreiber, it has often been "considered one of hip-hop's landmark albums", while Birchmeier said it was viewed like Nas' Illmatic (1994) as a classic hip hop album by a young rapper about their street and criminal experiences. Reasonable Doubt helped transfigure gangsta rap into Mafioso rap, popularizing the subgenre and the imagery of high class, expensive lifestyles and tastes in hip hop, including drinking Cristal, driving Lexus automobiles, and living out the plots of films such as Scarface and Carlito's Way. In the opinion of Miles Marshall Lewis, Reasonable Doubt was a "seminal" work that "shocked the world ... a personal touchstone for fans then Jay's own age who were getting their own hustles on—hip hop's young, gifted, and black". Jay-Z said that recreating Reasonable Doubt would be challenging, as he was living a different lifestyle with a completely different state of mind when he wrote the album. Reasonable Doubt was named one of the greatest hip hop albums of all time by The