I've no idea why it's taken me more than three decades to get hold of this. I bought the singles as they came out but, for some reason, not the album and - stranger still - only really noticed this as a massive oversight about a month ago, so here we are.
Paid In Full still sounds fresh as fuck in 2021 and remains unmistakably a major contender for one of those greatest rap album of all time lists. You can still hear the old school lineage drawn out from the Furious Five and others - all the sing-songy nursery rhyme acts - alongside the birth of modern rap, or what was modern rap before the advent of Lil Yachty and all those guys whom I suppose we should count just in case one of the under-twenties reads this and is struck down by low self-esteem. Yet rather than representing an intermediary point, Paid In Full seems to have become a sort of perfect timeless form existing at the exact temporospatial epicentre of all rap, which is why it doesn't seem to have dated and remains seemingly unique, or at least not quite like anything before or since.
The music and beats are minimal, the sort of thing which could have been recorded pretty much live, and maybe were for all I know; yet the looped beats, samples, cutting and scratching fills the space in ways which didn't often happen back in 1986, from what little I recall from reverb heavy beatbox records which always sounded as though they couldn't think of anything else to add. Rakim may have been superceded on the purely technical level of vocal acrobatics, but few have sounded so confident, so effortless, or so compelling. Sexual swearwords were still to be invented, so we don't even have so much as a bitch or a shit on this record, and Rakim spends plenty of time talking about his own lyricism and comes out of it still sounding hard as fuck without resorting to any of the traditional posturing - either gun toting or piously worthy.
Strangely, as a sort of perfect rap album in the Platonic sense - if that isn't so far up my own rear end that the words become illegible - Paid In Full improves everything in its vicinity like a nurturing, almost solar force reconnecting the listener to all the fundamental elements which made rap so great in the first place - the robot beats combined with the raw funk. I listened to one of the old Ma$e albums in the wake of this and even that sounded pretty decent.
Does it really get any better than Paid In Full?
I don't know.
I just don't know.
