Charli Baltimore - Cold as Ice (1999)

I was really looking forward to this one. Money was a great single, and Stand Up seemed to promise good things to come, full page adverts for the album began to appear in the usual places, and then nothing happened. I gather she fell out with the label, or her manager, or something along those lines. Five years flipped past and she turned up on Irv Gotti's Murderers album, but it seemed like the momentum had been lost.

It turns out that this was finally issued as a download only release in 2009, and so here we are at last.

It has to be tough for a female rapper in what is an overpoweringly masculine industry, and so Baltimore's first single was inevitably accompanied by predictable mutterings about whether or not she would have had a record out without having stimulated Christopher Wallace's penis. Probably not, seemed to be the consensus, regardless of the obvious quality of the record, which I suppose is par for the course. It might be argued that she did herself no favours given all the blow jobs which feature prominently in her lyrics and which would seem to support the notion of Charli Baltimore as Bernard Manning's idea of what a female rapper should be; although it might also be argued that this argument is itself only Ben Elton pulling the lemon-sucking face and tutting that she's no better than she ought to be, that one. The issue is probably best settled, if you really need it to be settled, by listening to the album.

A young woman doing what she has to do to get by under difficult circumstances probably sounds like an excuse, given the aforementioned quota of lyrical blow jobs, but there's a lot more to this album, and not actually much of it which fits the stereotype of the gold digging hoochie-mama who boffed Biggie. Vocally she sounds kind of bratty, which is okay, and lyrically she's acrobatic within an admittedly limited range of subjects, but there's a thoughtful edge to tracks such as Have It All and even the admittedly cinematic Thirty Miles to Baltimore, with a powerful element of tragedy running through the whole set.

Money remains hard to top, so I don't know if Cold as Ice was entirely worth the wait or whether it's really so good as I hoped it would be; but it's confident, convincing, and a testament to the ambition and vision of rap back in the nineties. Charli Baltimore really should have been huge.