Canibus - Can-I-Bus (1998)

I was about to muse upon how Canibus appeared to have vanished in the wake of the first two, when a moment's online research reveals that actually he released about a million albums since this debut and seems to have done well for himself, even if it turns out I've been facing the wrong direction all of this time. Anyway, I recall that this one didn't do so well as everyone had hoped, given the lad's brief tenure as the next big thing; and he spent at least some of the follow up blaming Wyclef for fucking up the production on the first, echoing what had been said in a few of the reviews, which probably contributed to my giving it a miss. Plus Canibus seemed like a bit of a dick, at least in interview, banging on about flying saucers, freemasons and other conspiracies, qualifying this obsession by proposing that sceptics were uneducated fools who enjoyed being blind to the truth of the true facts, and so on and so forth.

Also, naming yourself after the ganja…

So once again, here I am two decades after the fact thinking, how bad could it have been?

Well, Channel Zero, in which our man explains about lost civilisations, aliens and stuff, is frankly fucking stupid, although one can't help but admire the lyrical dexterity by which he attaches this particular kick me sign to his own ass; but apart from that, Can-I-Bus is not at all what I expected. I was aware of his being a pretty decent lyricist - formidable even - and his name turns up in a few of those all-time top fifty listings. On the strength of this set, I'd say he could be top ten, not least if either Tupac or Eminem made it into any of the aforementioned listings - which I'm sure they did seeing as how they usually do. He's mostly a battle rapper, and it shows on this album, which would have been a bit monothematic except you're too busy tripping over the wordplay to notice; and extra points for the massively satisfying LL Cool J takedown. As the man says:

More lines than the bible quoted from Jesus.
More lines than a African herd of zebras.

Production-wise, sorry, but Wyclef did a great job. I don't see how it sounded too commercial - as was the accusation - in 1998, and in 2022 it may as well be an underground DJ Premier mixtape recorded direct from AM radio, just one copy owned by the artist's mum. It's a clean sound for sure, but hardly conventional or pop or mainstream beyond Wyclef presumably making sure it wouldn't scare anyone off playing it on the radio. It's not the greatest rap album ever, or the greatest debut ever, but it's fucking solid for something the artist ended up disowning; and if it failed to knock Illmatic or Ready to Die or whatever from the throne, we can at least justify Can-I-Bus named in the same sentence, which isn't too shabby.