In a contemporary review for
Rolling Stone, Havelock Nelson wrote that the album "drops raw realism and pays tribute to hip-hop virtuosity".
Edna Gundersen of
USA Today found "Dre's prowess as beat-master and street preacher" to be "undeniable".
Village Voice critic
Robert Christgau dismissed it as "sociopathic
easy-listening" and "bad pop music" whose innovation—Dre's departure from sampling—is not inspired by contemporary
P-Funk, but rather
blaxploitation soundtracks, which led him to combine preset bass lines with imitations of "
Bernie Worrell's high keyb
sustain, a basically irritating sound that in context always signified fantasy, not reality—stoned self-loss or, at a best Dre never approaches, grandiose jive." He felt that the brutal lyrical threats were vague and lacked detail, but that Snoop Dogg rhymed "
drolly" and less dully than Dre.
Selects Adam Higginbotham opined that
The Chronic was not as strong as releases from other gangster rap artists such as
Ice Cube and
Da Lench Mob and found it neither as "musically sharp, nor as lyrically smart as the latter".
Trouser Press noted that "all of Dre's production wizardry can't mask the nasty misogyny that is essential to his mythos." In a retrospective piece,
Jon Pareles from
The New York Times said that
The Chronic and
Snoop Dogg's
Doggystyle "made the gangsta life sound like a party occasionally interrupted by gunplay". In
Rolling Stones
500 Greatest Albums of All Time, it was noted that "Dre funked up the rhymes with a smooth bass-heavy production style and the laid-back delivery of then-unknown rapper
Snoop Doggy Dogg."
Time magazine's
Josh Tyrangiel states that Dr. Dre created "a sound that defined early 90s urban
L.A. in the same way that
Motown defined 60s
Detroit". That year, readers of
Hip Hop Connection voted it the fourth best album of all time, leading the magazine to speculate, "In a few years' time, it could even be remembered as
the best rap album of all time."
The Chronic was included in
Vibe magazine's list of the 100 Essential Albums of the 20th Century, and the magazine later included it in their list of the Top 10 Rap Albums of All Time, dubbing it a "decade-defining opus". The record was voted as one of the top 10 pop albums of the 1990s by the music writers of
The Associated Press. The record was ranked eighth in
Spin magazine's "90 Greatest Albums of the '90s", and in 2005, it was ranked at number thirty-five in their list of the "100 Greatest Albums, 1985–2005".
Rolling Stone ranked
The Chronic at number 138 on their list of the
"500 Greatest Albums of All Time", The following year,
Time magazine named it as one of "The All-
Time 100 Albums". In a retrospective issue,
XXL magazine awarded
The Chronic a perfect "XXL" rating.
The Source, who originally gave the album a rating of 4.5 out of 5 mics in 1993, would later include it in their list of the 100 Best Rap Albums; in 2008, the magazine's former editor Reginald Dennis remarked that he "would have given it a five" in retrospect—the magazine's editors had a strict rule forbidding five-mic ratings at the time—and that "no one could have predicted the seismic shift that this album would produce".
The Chronic is listed in the book
1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. == Commercial performance ==