Talent pools prior to 1900?

How are you measuring it ?
I've been listening to Scarface The Diary, for an example, for 23 years now and it gets better and I hear more and appreciate more now than I did when it was 1 year or 5 years old.
Kanye's been putting out mainstream/pop stuff since he first arrived. Some of it very good.

Scarface and Raekwon were in a GOLDEN AGE of the genre.
You seem to be taking the "modernist" line against the orthodoxy that acknowledges that was a more fruitful and flourishing creative era in the hip-hop genre.

Do serious hip hop appreciators consider Kanye to have put out an album as good as, say, Illmatic ?

And I don't think anyone rates any of these guys alongside John Coltrane. Different genre, I know. But there are levels to this.

 

For me personally, a guy like Scarface doesn't work as hard, as smart, as creatively, or as intuitively as Kanye West in making sure the song enriches the listener.

Kanye is not pop. If he is pop, it would have to be a new subsection of pop music dedicated to deeply authentic music. Kanye came up in Chicago being mentored by NO ID, Com, and other guys like Kwe, Mos, and The Roots. He has serious credibility in the underground scene as a really talented spitter with incredible production.

You could also argue that Pac, Jay, Wayne and Biggy are pop, but when your "pop-like" music is infused with real bars of substance, you can't just lump it in with Brittany Spears.

 

No, but many of them consider Illmatic to be the greatest album of all time, so that's a tough standard. They certainly rate some (most?) of Kanye's albums above Diary though. Raekwon's OB4CL probably gets rated higher than any of Kanye's albums, but most of the success of that album is due to Rza's production (and overall soundscape) and Ghostface's rhymes.

 

Illmatic is a tough standard. Many great rappers have that one classic album.
How many have as many classic albums as Kanye at that level of quality?

 

Fat Joe is the Tony Galento of rap music.

 

March 1996 edition of Boxing Illustrated, page 29.

 

The study as stated above, is published in Boxing Illustrated, and written by Herb Goldman.

He gets his data on the number of boxing clubs fromn a 1985 study:

"In The Ring and Out: Professional Boxing in New York", 1896-1920"

That article is is published in Sport in America: New Historical Perspectives, edited by Donald Spivey, published by Greenwood Press.

There may well be other studies, but this is the only one that I am aware of.

 

I think you can get this on the internet.....in america the participants in the sport was huge by 1910, but before there was huge interest but it had legal problems...by 1910 something there was incredible amount of cards and clubs in nystate a....before 1900 as shown in boxrec the legality wasn't there...the most pro boxers in us was probably late twenties before the crash but between the wars there was more legality and tremendous competition..after ww 2 in america participation weakened

 

The title of this article "Professional Boxing in New York, 1896-1920" seems to imply it is about New York.

Does it cover the rest of the country and the rest of the world?

 

Getting off music and back to the boxing talent pool,

There appears to be a world of difference between the 1890's and the 1910's and certainly the 1920's.

Info that is available on baseball venues for example. The old Polo Grounds in New York, built in 1890 with wooden stands, had a capacity of 16,000. The Baker Bowl in Philadelphia, built in 1895, was state of the art for the era, and had a capacity of 12,000.
By the 1910 to 1920 era much bigger baseball parks were the norm. The Polo Grounds burned down in 1911 and a new steel and concrete stadium was built. A game in the 1911 World Series at the new Polo Grounds was attended by a crowd of over 38,000. Several big ballparks were built during this decade, Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, Forbes Field, Griffith Stadium, Ebbets Field, Shibe Park, Comiskey Park (all venues for major outdoor boxing matches over the decades). Braves Field in Boston was the largest for that era, with a crowd of 47,000 for a 1916 world series game.
By the 1920's, even these parks would seem small. The Polo Grounds was expanded in 1923 to 52,000 for baseball (82,000 for Dempsey-Firpo). Yankee Stadium was built in 1923 and in the Series that year had a crowd of 62,000. Like the Polo Grounds, Yankee Stadium sat far more for football or boxing, with seating on the field, with normal crowds of over 70,000 for football and a peak crowd of 88,150 for Louis-Baer in 1935.
The football stadiums built in the 1920's were even bigger in seating capacity (the playing field being much smaller) with Municipal Stadium in Philadelphia (120,000 for Tunney-Dempsey I) and Soldier's Field in Chicago (105,000 for Tunney-Dempsey II) over 100,000 and several other giant stadiums like the Rose Bowl and the Los Angeles Coliseum built and quickly expanded.
My point here is that the much larger venues point to the expanding public interest in sports generally with boxing one of the booming sports.
It might be true that baseball was in its formative stages in the 1890's, but it was the sport which was able to construct the largest venues. I don't know of a major boxing venue from that era. Anyone know of one?

 

This is what I would expect. Boxing restricted to white areas of the British Empire and the US. Hard to see the talent pool could match the much wider population base of the post 1920's period.

In the USA,, the population was 62 million in 1890. About 29 million lived on farms, and another huge percentage lived in small towns in farming areas. The vast influx of immigrants flooding into the cities from Europe and also the rural South from the 1890's into the 1920's were the source of the boxing talent pool. Hard to believe the 1890's were competitive in sheer numbers or impact. The US population reached 120 million in the 1920's.

 

That's my take on it too! Very tiny talent pool in the late 19th century... at least compared to post WW1, where boxing became more widespread, and activity grew to an all-time high in the 20's and 30's.

Which reminds me of this Mike Silver quote from a 2010 interview:
"In the 1920's there were more professional fighters licensed in New York City than there are licensed in the entire world today"

Are there official NYSAC numbers from back then (where it's stated, how many licensed boxers they had at a given time), that backs up this claim?

 

I bet everyone in your local bar is relieved when you go home early! On Sundays I go to a pub to listen to Jazz, my companions there are 5 retired English teachers,none of them use the verbiage you spout and they would be less than impressed to hear the posturing shite that issues from your finger tips.

 

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"Top 10 data" versus "top 100 data"

Well, I don't know what was said or wasn't, but a top ten is so few fighters that the results can be distorted by one outlier. For example, Primo Carnera was a top ten man in the early 1930's and so he makes the era look large. Ewart Potgeiter was not a top ten man in the early 1950's, and it seems a "small" era. But what if it had been reversed, with Carnera never amounting to much and Potgeiter being a contender? It would massively change a top ten for each period, with the 1950's perhaps looking larger.

A top 100 is a wide enough sample to level off the effect of such aberrations, at least to a great extent.