Lil' Flip - I Need Mine $$ (2007)

As a disclaimer for the benefit of anyone reading this blog for the first time, I'm nearly a million years old, I write about what I like, and I make no claim to have had my finger on any pulse since around 1997 at the very latest. Barely literate comments along the lines of thiz opinon iz garbage Dogg Pound is tha $hit are pretty much wasted on me, even if you're not actually some little white dude lurking in his mother's basement. By the same token, I picked this one up because it was there and I enjoyed The Leprechaun. Flip could be the most successful rap artist of all time for all I know and you may already be bored shitless of the guy, but I can't really be arsed to do my research and you'll just have to humour Grandpa as he muses about this new fangled Beatles band.

No, I don't know if you're literally expected to pronounce it I Need Mine Dollar Dollar and it probably doesn't matter. The Leprechaun was decent, if not enough so to have me actively hunting down the rest. Nevertheless, this was in the rack and I had the money, so here we are.

Freestyle king or not, I don't recall Flip as being particularly gymnastic in the lyrical department, but here he's come on somewhat since the debut, and not in the direction I expected. Whenever I try to work out what happened to rap since I stopped listening - or at least got too old and too busy to continue giving it my undivided attention - I always seem to find trap music on the end of the line - guys I've never heard of growling out a few pages of bank statements over what sounds like an 808 being rogered by Sonic the Hedgehog, and all recorded on a fucking smartphone. If Lil' Flip ever went down that road, as I felt certain he probably would, there was no sign of it in 2007. Lyrically, if he's not quite Nas, you can tell he's thinking about this shit and putting in the work, developing his own voice beyond being one of those guys who turns up on someone else's CD to remind us that he also finds himself in a financially enviable situation; but two whole discs…

Not many rappers can manage the double disc thing, and yet Lil' Flip succeeds where other, possibly better publicised artists have fallen on their arses. The key seems to be variety. The standard is already high for this slightly expensive sounding album, with even those beats steering closest to the trap demonstrating a certain wide screen polish elevating them above the usual ringtones. Elsewhere we have tracks recalling the golden age of west coast g-funk and Real Hip Hop which swings across to the other side of the country, and it all blends seamlessly into a genuinely eclectic whole, feeling, if anything, a little like one of the Neptunes era Snoop albums. For someone so firmly rooted in his home soil - Houston, Texas for those unaware - Flip does a great job of covering all bases, in terms of both geography and even era, acknowledging the east coast roots of the culture as well as the usual roll call of greats; and we have guest spots from names similarly diverse as MJG, DJ Squeeky, Scott Storch, Mannie Fresh, Nate Dogg, Three-6-Mafia, Yukmouth and others. There's very little that's not to love about these - holy mother of God - thirty-nine tracks spanning social conscience to good old fashioned boasting, somehow amounting to a surprisingly soulful, feelgood set.

I probably need to have a look and see if he did any others.

DJ Squeeky presents Tom Skeemask - 2 Wild for the World (1998)

Just the other day I happened to slip upon a patch of oil left over and not yet cleared up after stripping down and cleaning my numerous hand guns and assault rifles, and falling against the computer I found myself accidentally online and unintentionally logged on to a bulletin board dedicated to the children's television show Doctor Who. Naturally I made attempts to sign out but, already confused, I found that I had instead been drawn into a section of the forum dedicated to music, and specifically to a thread purportedly set up for fans of hip hop and rap, although it would be fairer to describe it as a thread for forum members owning one or two rap albums. It took only seconds to locate the first claim of there having been no decent rap music recorded since the first Wu-Tang Clan album, because it's all that Puff Daddy and commercial rap like Lil' Wayne, and Public Enemy were great, and in fact It Takes A Nation of Millions is probably the best rap album ever - and yes, I know I'm going out on a limb with such a bold, unpopular statement - and we don't like that commercial rap because we only like the underground stuff which you probably won't have heard of because it's underground and not commercial like Puff Daddy and that bass music, whatever it's called; the Fugees were good too, and that Will Smith is a great entertainer...

Luckily I had already returned my firearms to the rack in Junior's room, because I really, really felt like emptying a clip into the fuckin' screen, lemme tell ya...

This was about rap for people who don't actually like rap - rap deemed more adventurous and underground than the Puff Daddy commercial rap because it appeals to fans of Radiohead and really interesting groups of that sort, because it's progressive and exciting and not actually much like rap, which is all too commercial and made by angry black men talking about guns and money and saying some really sexist stuff too, like that so-called Fat Joe. Alex Petridis in the Guradian pointed out that Fat Joe has a song called Shit is Real which just goes to show what a stupid, uneducated fellow he is. Shit is Real - I mean come on, it's hardly William Blake now is it snurf snurf...

So that was how I came to experience a sudden and overpowering need to cleanse my soul with some real rap, as distinguished by its copious swearing, threatening behaviour, actual beats, and fixation on real shit of flavours rarely experienced by folks with fucking cLOUDDEAD records; and as is appreciated by people who listen to rap. This will undoubtedly resemble sneering, but fuck it - if you don't like rap just go ahead and say it, but don't claim otherwise whilst referencing some shit that came out a quarter of a century ago as representative of the last time it was good enough for you to bother listening. Piss off and take your friggin' Buck 65 twelves with you back to fuckin' Starbucks.

Tom Skeemask is, for what it may be worth, the real deal. He says stuff you really might not want to hear, but which might do you good to hear; and whilst he may not be the greatest rapper in the world, he really ain't that bad, and if there's any suggestion that maybe he doesn't mean it, or that he's just saying this stuff so as to appear like some commercial rap big shot - you know, like that Puff Daddy, well - he's probably not that hard to track down, so please feel free to go ahead and tell him to his face. It's violent and territorial because sometimes life is violent and shitty and unhappy, and territory is the only thing some people have at the lower end of the economy.

This is southern rap - hard words spat out at machine gun tempo and a hot, slow Memphis vibe timed to the pace of life in the hotter states, places in which the weather obliges you to move around real slow for the best part of the day. It's closer in spirit to Eightball & MJG than any Hypnotize Minds thing - electric piano, lush guitar licks, and a bass so deep you can only hear it in cars, it being designed to scare the shit out of whoever you happen to drive past at snail's pace with your window down. DJ Squeeky lays down the tracks and Tom Skeemask tells it like it is, and there isn't much more to say about it because it speaks for itself, what with being the real thing and all.

I feel better now.

Thank you, Tom Skeemask.