"Late Registration" appeared on year-end best album lists for 2005 by numerous publications, including being listed as the best album of the year by "USA Today", "Spin", and "Time". "Rolling Stone" also named the album as the best of 2005, and hailed it as a "sweepingly generous, absurdly virtuosic hip-hop classic." In "The Village Voice"s 2005 Pazz & Jop nationwide poll of 795 popular music critics, "Late Registration" finished at number one by a wide margin over any of the other album nominees. This was the second year in a row that West topped the poll, a feat that had occurred only one other time over twenty years ago by The Clash. On the "Washington City Paper"s list of the top 20 favourite albums of 2005 calculated from points assigned by the magazine's music writers, the album finished at number four with 43 points, becoming one of the five albums to score over 40 that year. "Late Registration" became West's second consecutive album to be rated "XXL" by "XXL", the magazine's highest rank, which has been awarded to only sixteen other hip-hop albums.