In a contemporary review for
The Washington Post, Mark Jenkins highlighted the single "Eric B. Is President" but was unimpressed by the rest of
Paid in Full: "Its beats are monotonous, and the attempts to take 'jazz and the quiet storm' and 'convert into hip-hop form' fall flat." Robert Christgau gave the album a "B" grade in his "Consumer Guide" column for
The Village Voice. Writing in 2001, he said it has "four groundbreaking masterworks" in "I Ain't No Joke", "I Know You Got Soul", "Paid in Full", and "Eric B. Is President", but was less enthusiastic about the other six songs: "They're pure, innovative, in-your-face—no doubt. But they're also turntablism with spoken decoration, of small use to anyone who hasn't internalized the 'real' hip hop aesthetic." In the newspaper's annual
Pazz & Jop critics' poll, it was named the 27th best album of 1987.
Paid in Full was released during what became known as the
golden age hip-hop era. In
The Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004),
Sasha Frere-Jones called it "one of hip-hop's perfect records", Author William Cobb stated in
To the Break of Dawn that his rapping had "stepped outside" of the preceding era of
old school hip-hop and that while the vocabulary and lyrical dexterity of newer rappers had improved, it was "nowhere near what Rakim introduced to the genre". AllMusic's Steve Huey declared
Paid in Full one of hip-hop's most influential albums and "essential listening" for those interested in the genre's "basic musical foundations". In 2003,
Rolling Stone listed
Paid in Full at number 228 on "
The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time", maintaining the rating in a 2012 revised list, calling it "Ice-grilled, laid-back, diamond-sharp: Rakim is a front-runner in the race for Best Rapper Ever, and this album is a big reason why." In the 2020 reboot of the list, the album's rank shot up to number 61. Similarly,
Blender magazine included the album in its "500 CDs You Must Own Before You Die".
Time magazine listed it as one of the eighteen albums of the 1980s in its "All-TIME 100" albums; editor
Alan Light acknowledged the record changed the "sound, flow, and potential" of hip-hop and that if Rakim is "the greatest MC of all time, as many argue, this album is the evidence". By 2018, at which point
Pitchfork had substantially altered their list of the top albums of the 1980s,
Paid in Full was moved to number eleven and called ″a crowning achievement of hip-hop's first golden age″ and one of the genre's ″glittering Rosetta Stones″.
Slant Magazine listed the album at #32 on its list of "Best Albums of the 1980s" saying "For his part, Rakim didn't need to rely on macho jargon and trite gangsterisms for his self-aggrandizing sermons; he would simply reel off line after line of spellbinding wordplay, influencing an entire decade of tongue-twisting MCs in the process." Rakim is credited with influencing rappers including the
Wu-Tang Clan,
Jay-Z,
50 Cent, and
Nas, who cited
Paid in Full as one of his favorite albums. 50 Cent told
NME that
Paid in Full was the first album he bought: "I used to get my grandmother's tape recorder – the one she used to tape church services – and record hip-hop off the radio. And, with Eric B. & Rakim, I think that was the first moment where I felt like, 'I've got to own this. This is crucial.'" "It was a record that caused trouble," remarked
Busta Rhymes, "but it was one you couldn't top."
Eminem borrows or interpolates lines from
Paid in Full on tracks from
The Marshall Mathers LP including "My Melody" ("I'm Back") and "As The Rhyme Goes On" ("
The Way I Am"). On July 11, 1995, the
Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) certified the album
platinum. As of December 1997, it had sold over a million copies. == Track listing ==