Bone Crusher - Free (2007)

 

Free? Free from what? Free from the previous and highly unsatisfactory record contract? Free to record exactly what you want to record? Free from expectations of your releasing an album which isn't complete shite?

Older boys and girls may recall Bone Crusher as part of that new south thing a couple of decades back, and AttenCHUN!, his quietly terrifying debut, meant the new south actually was briefly a thing rather than just David Banner then yet another batch of disposable club twats photocopying Three-6-Mafia out-takes, probably with Jermaine Dupri jumping up and down in the background trying to get your attention, as usual. AttenCHUN! was fight music of the best kind, an angry fat guy losing his shit over pinging drum machines with the sort of growling intensity by which Fiend, Mystikal and Pastor Troy made their reputations. So, ignoring the peculiar fact of the cover resembling a 1986 issue of Smash Hits and the promise of Free featuring Valley High - whatever the hell that is - I snatched this from the shelves without too much umming or ahing.

Unfortunately, sometimes you can judge a book by the cover, and Free sounds about as good as it looks. Some bloke on the internet suggested that it resembles a Gwen Stefani record, which is fair. One thing which it doesn't sound like is AttenCHUN! Bone Crusher doesn't even rap here. Mostly he sings, and while his voice is just about good enough to negate the need for autotune, the customary autotuned vocal sounds conspicuously absent from the plinky-plonky compu-pop over which he sings. Frequent references are made to rock music, apparently proposing that rock music is what we have here, but it's no more a convincing argument than the chorus of Fat Boy Rock Star.

I'm a fat boy rock star.
All I do is play my guitar.

Brilliant, although he doesn't actually play his guitar at all on this album, and what guitar is to be heard on Fat Boy Rock Star - the song specifically quantifying just how much Bone Crusher loves to play his guitar - is patently sampled with no attempt made to disguise the fact. Free sounds like children's music, and maybe our big-boned pal made the album for his kids; which is fine but it would have been nice to have had a bit more warning, at least something beyond just terrible artwork - misleadingly offset by the mention of Rhythm D as producer on the back cover, presumably a different Rhythm D to the psychopath at the desk of MC Ren's thoroughly ruthless Shock of the Hour, unless maybe he fell and hit his head or something.

Free isn't the worst thing I've ever heard, and as synthpop, it probably doesn't suck significantly harder than solo albums recorded by members of Depeche Mode, but coming from the guy who gave us AttenCHUN!, it's a shocker and is therefore going straight back to the store.

No Limit Reunion - HEB Center, Cedar Park, Texas (21st May 2022)

I've never been a massive fan of live music - although admittedly it's mainly the venues, other people, and the considerable inconvenience of getting home after which usually bothers me; and No Limit being a rap label, I was aware it probably wouldn't even be live music, technically speaking, thus expanding my customary reservations to encompass the possibility of my watching what amounts to a karaoke performance; but it was the No Limit Reunion, meaning even if the whole thing turned out to be a massive pile of shite, it seemed like a once in a lifetime deal and I would be forever kicking myself should I do the usual thing by staying at home. I've been listening to No Limit since about 1996, picking up more or less everything I could find. If it was on the racks and it was a No Limit release, then it was usually worth hearing. Some of it was labelled gangsta rap, but it was always much more than just that; and if No Limit artists were regarded as low rent and lacking class by those who make it their business to provide such distinctions, they sold a fucking truckload of records and put out a lot of music which didn't really sound like anyone else. Of course, it couldn't last, and No Limit had a nervous breakdown around the turn of the century. Fiend and Mystikal jumped ship - as did the in-house production team, Beats by the Pound - C-Murder was incarcerated and Mia X's career seemed to have stalled. Harsh words were exchanged both on and off the microphone. Master P spent at least some of the 504 Boyz second album congratulating himself on having gotten rid of all those losers, many of whom had turned up on the Most Wanted label's Off the Tank compilation to remind us why they had jumped rather than wait to be pushed. Even from afar, it looked messy and absolutely final.

So in 2019, I almost quacked my pants at the prospect of Fiend and the rest back together on the same stage. It didn't seem like something that could really happen; and then it didn't because of the coronavirus; and now here we are in 2022 cashing in on tickets issued at the end of the previous decade.

I didn't know what to expect, and the opening act - some local Austin thing - were underwhelming. This was probably because I'd put in my ear plugs, being an old, old man and all, which reduced the sound level to something more manageable, unfortunately also allowing me to tell the difference between live vocals and the backing track; and it was almost all backing track, not even karaoke, just four blokes jumping about on stage to one they had recorded earlier, serving as hype men for their own record. JayQ the Legend was next, and not only from New Orleans - the home of No Limit - but a lot more watchable. His music, incorporating rap but keeping it open, had elements of R&B, dancehall, bounce, trap, and doubtless many others I've never heard of, and if there was more autotune than I usually like, he made up for it with dynamic stage presence and a passion which didn't feel like career moves.

Fiend hit the stage like a bomb going off, growling his way through hits from his No Limit albums and - big surprise - Get the Fuck Out My Face from his post-No Limit Headbussaz set; and even if it was just a man rapping along to a sound file, it worked because the sound was immense with the sort of bass that tickles your arsehole, the high end all clear, no distortion and - at the risk of committing hyperbole - one of the greatest rappers of all time right there, just fifteen foot away, giving it his grimiest best in the flesh. I nearly lost my shit when he unleashed the Headbussaz track; and yes, unleashed really was the word here.

Mia X was next, and was formidable, amazing, and all of the other adjectives - as I'd sort of hoped she would be. She was always amongst the more lyrical of the No Limit stable, and but for the lack of a New York zip code would probably enjoy a somewhat more legendary status than is presently the case. Time dictated that tonight would be a run through of hits, but she probably could have got away with all three albums in their entirety without anyone looking at their watch. Again, I was aware of witnessing one of the all-time greats in action. Following Mia, Mystikal took the baton, delivering a characteristically twitchy, yelping performance which really brought home the James Brown influence more so than is apparent from the records.

 

Next was Silk the Shocker, who was mostly great but probably should have been first on the bill; then followed by Master P himself, the guy who started it all. He was never the greatest rapper or the most lyrical, and tonight was mainly hooks and slogans as he sort of jogged back and forth across the stage; but his records work on a combination of balls-out self-belief, not really giving a shit, and raw honesty, and so it was tonight because, even if the man has never been scared to rhyme a word with itself, his charisma radiates from the stage like he's some cartoon superhero.

The mood that had been building all night came to a head with Master P's performance, and as the others came back to drop bars for the posse cuts; and if it wasn't quite religious, there was certainly a gospel element. This was a celebration in every sense, not least that we've all come through - as we're reminded during the slideshow of those lost, Big Ed, Magic, Soulja Slim and too many others; and it really is a we because tonight made it very clear that No Limit is, was, and has always been a family. That's really how it felt at the end of the night, and I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

Mystikal - Unpredictable (1997)

While I always enjoyed Mystikal turning up on other people's tracks, I never took the plunge with a whole album. The sheer intensity of his delivery seemed like something which would make for tough listening over an hour or more; but I found this in the racks like someone half remembered from school and it seemed like it would be stupid to just pass it by - rude even - and so once again here I am learning the error of my ways, nearly a quarter of a century behind the curve as per fucking usual.

Taxonomically speaking, Mystikal is to be found occupying roughly the same branch of the rap family tree as Fiend, Full Blooded, Ludachris, and possibly Busta Rhymes - gruffly voiced dudes who sound like they're about to explode most of the time. If the mighty Fiend can be considered the alpha male bullfrog of rap, then Mystikal is probably the Tasmanian devil - both the critter and the guy from the Bugs Bunny cartoons. My guess would be that the influence of James Brown looms large, although possibly not so large as the hellfire Baptists Mystikal almost certainly encountered growing up in New Orleans. His delivery is pretty shocking first time you hear it, the sort of thing that has you holding the speaker upside down to see whether it's broken. He yells, he whoops, he growls, he howls like his eyes are about to pop right out of his head with the sheer force of testimony, and he changes gear from rumbling tornado warning to five-hundred miles an hour with unpredictable ferocity - hence the title, I guess. All that booty-bounce My Little Pony rap which the yoots dem are so keen on these days began with either Mystikal or members of his platoon; so it's perhaps his fault, although to be fair, he did it a million times better and it's not like he's been sending out invitations to rip him off. The difference, I suppose, is that Mystikal's delivery remains clear no matter how close he gets to the point of lyrical meltdown, and he delivers shit that's worth hearing, which makes for incredible listening.

So, an entire album of this bloke pebbledashing one's lugholes actually works and isn't at all like listening to extreme metal, as I assumed it would be - although it could be argued that the growled chorus of Oh Shit! Motherfucker! Goddamit! on U Can't Handle This works a lot like some metal riff. It probably helps that Beats by the Pound, the No Limit label's in house production team really gave this album its own sound, one which could mostly be transposed to a live band as distinct from some of the weirder techno stutter with which they graced sets by C-Murder and the rest. So it's almost jazzy, or at least has jazzy overtones, bolted to hard as fuck beats blended in with chiming guitar funk, piano and so on; all of which keeps Unpredictable nicely grounded as our boy raps his face off - literally by the sound of it. It also helps that Unpredictable is good to the last drop with not a single skip button special in evidence. He keeps it moving and he keeps it startling, and I need to track down those other albums while I can still afford the fuckers. Unpredictable was one of No Limit's best beyond any shadow of doubt.

Full Blooded & HOUND Faculty - Untamed (2001)

Thank God for the internet, otherwise I probably wouldn't have discovered this one ever having existed. Full Blooded's Memorial Day of 1998 made a big impression on me. It didn't quite sound like any other album released by No Limit, or even any other rap album for that matter - not trying to suggest Full Blooded was ever the rap equivalent of Farmer's Manual or whoever, but it very much had its own sound and its own mood. Unfortunately, Memorial Day doesn't seem particularly well remembered and didn't get much of a push, subsequently sinking to the level of one of those other No Limit releases alongside the Gambino Family, Sons of Funk and the rest. This probably didn't quite count as a crime on the scale of failing to keep Fiend in the stable - although admittedly I'm not actually sure what happened there with regards to jumper and pushee - but Full Blooded is a fucking great rapper and it seems bizarre that No Limit never got around to issuing a follow up album, or even the promised debut from his group, Hounds of Gert Town.

Never mind because there's this, as I've discovered nearly two decades later - independently released, probably sold six copies, but nevertheless doing every bit of whatever business you might need it to do. Untamed actually makes Memorial Day sound kind of expensive with its relatively lavish production from Beats by the Pound, with this one being maybe a bit more bedroom in terms of scale, and with more than a hint of someone's Casio keyboard; but it plays to its strengths, underpinning everything with a bass that just won't take no for an answer, and emphasising Full Blooded's blues heritage with soulful, occasionally even mournful electric piano - and it all pulls together with such feeling that you cease to hear the budget.

Full Blooded occupies approximately the same part of the rap table of elements as Fiend, maybe a few squares along from Mystikal or even ODB, but lacking the need for throat lozenges. He sounds punch drunk, verbally dancing around the beats like he's in the boxing ring, lines dropped as though he's hurling them at the song. So it's imprecise, nothing to set your watch by, and the form mirrors the subject. Untamed really is modern blues straight from a Louisiana porch with the paint flaking off, no flossing here just grinding poverty, and doing what you have to do, and maybe not feeling too great about it. It took a couple of plays, but this one really gets its hooks into you and makes for essential cathartic listening on a shitty day; which is pretty good going for such a terminally underpublicised album. I don't even know if this guy is still alive, but if he is, I hope he gets a kick out of someone still spinning this shit two decades later. He really should've been a contender.

Full Blooded - Memorial Day (1998)

Here we are again with some more evidence in support of our thesis quantifying just how badly the No Limit label screwed up at the peak of its success towards the close of the last century. The story, so far as I understand it, runs with No Limit blowing up against all expectations around 1996, shifting shitloads of records on newly minted reputation alone, then assuming this situation would continue indefinitely, the No Limit brand having effectively become a license to print money. I recall the Full Blooded album being relegated to one tiny corner of a two page spread in one of those glossy rap magazines, taking up not even a sixteenth of the advertisement as a whole, more like a thirty-secondth or something. So Memorial Day bombed because apparently its being on the No Limit label wasn't enough to guarantee nationwide sales, and it doesn't seem like it really had a lot of promotion.

Whilst we're here, the inlay of those No Limit discs were always abrim with in-house advertising, specifically promising forthcoming works from upcoming artists for which Pen & Pixel had already done the covers, possibly before the things were even  recorded; and yet so few of them ever dropped so we never got to hear those albums by Short Circuit, Two for One, DIG, QB, Popeye, Porsha, A-Lexxus, Samm, Tank Doggs or any of the the rest; and I always thought this seemed a bit crap - maybe not quite a broken promise, but like the diamond encrusted No Limit sphincter just couldn't cash the cheques its mouth had been writing; or even worse, like somebody somewhere didn't quite have as much confidence in the material as claimed and was terrified of backing anything less than a triple platinum disc. This looked bad - to me at least - because ideally you want a label which gets behind its artists rather than its shareholders, artistically speaking.

I wouldn't ordinarily give a shit, but it nevertheless seems a shame because Memorial Day is a fucking good record, and at least as distinctive as anything by Fiend or Mystikal or any of those other No Limit regulars who might be credited with changing the face of rap by some definition, or part of that face.

Memorial Day lurches into gear with weird swells of strings and nothing quite pinned down to a rhythm as Full Blooded loses it in front of a microphone, rapping with all the desperate menace of the guy in the parking lot who staggers towards you begging a dollar or a cigarette or the fuck whatever you got, man...

It's a dark album, in case that isn't obvious from the cover, and probably dark enough to qualify as gothic in some sense. In fact, fuck it - screw gothic, this is more like the real thing. Gothic may as well be kids in black clothes for whom a crap drawing of a skull and a shitty Neil Gaiman comic will serve as metaphor for the endless torment and pain of your dad expecting you to get a job so he can have his basement back; whereas this is more concerned with surviving day to day whilst trying to avoid being shot at, and with bereavement as a daily event of such crushing familiarity that singing pretty songs about it whilst wearing eyeliner somehow just doesn't seem quite enough. Oddly, whilst Memorial Day is hardly an uplifting album, neither is it entirely in the vein of grunting black metal types, and probably because it's all about surviving under grim circumstances rather than celebrating the details of the same; and this is greatly helped by the music, a dirty, sweaty, sludge of bluesy southern gospel with a few arcade games thrown in.

Wikipedia refers to this guy in past tense which seems a shame as he clearly had a lot to say, and was saying it entirely on his own terms without really sounding like anyone else out there, gruffly cramming those bars into beats with just the rhyme at the end of each line to let you know it was still entertainment, that we were still listening to a compact disc, and we hadn't quite crossed over into real life. Memorial Day may not quite represent some lost and unappreciated masterpiece, but I have trouble comparing it to anything else which has happened since, and it really deserves to be heard.

Fiend - The Addiction (2006)

If ever proof were needed that the millennial success of New Orleans' No Limit Records was more luck than judgement, one need look no further than the bewildering estrangement of Fiend. I don't really care who failed to buy who a pint and a packet of cheese and onion crisps when it was their round; any label with its head screwed on would have moved heaven, earth, and all the damp bits in the middle to keep a rapper of this calibre on its books.

For those to whom the name may be unfamiliar, Fiend is a burping rap bullfrog, a voice full of bluesy gravel that's very much an instrument in its own right, in addition to which he's also a decent lyricist - definitely one of the southern greats in my estimation - and a formidable producer.

Anyway, I was quite excited - all those thousands of years ago - when this album was first announced as forthcoming from Ruff Ryders being as the New York label seemed like it might be a perfect fit for our boy, what with him having the kind of jagged edge that would perfectly complement the likes of DMX, the LOX and so on; but for whatever reason, The Addiction eventually came out on his own Fiend Entertainment label. We didn't get any of those weird Swizz Beatz rhythms as anticipated, and it's all kept very much Louisiana style with production divided mainly between Fiend himself and his former No Limit stable-mates, Beats By The Pound reborn here as the Medicine Men, but there's nothing to inspire disappointment.

Given the geography, it's become something of a cliché to describe this sort of thing as a gumbo, but you can hear why. The Medicine Men always had a distinctive sound, albeit one that became a little too familiar during their stay at No Limit, particularly during that era when it seemed like Master P decided that even the fucker who cleaned his pool probably had an album in him somewhere; but unburdened of the requirement to turd out four albums a week, and so allowed to create at a less demanding pace, the boys found their mojo once again. Everything is thrown in: tinkly piano, soulful guitar, brush drums, gun shots, cheap orchestral stabs and the sort of bass that makes you ill if you listen to it for too long; grooves are formed rather than songs as such, but weird grooves quite clearly cohered under the influence of something or other - not quite the sort of tunes one would find in nature. None of this will be unfamiliar to anyone who ever heard a track produced by this bunch, but they really go some strange and unfamiliar places on this album, at least as close as this sort of dirty, sweat-soaked menace ever came to early Pink Floyd with these tracks of mushroomy psychedelia or NyQuil-fuelled trains of meandering thought.

Oddly, I'm not even sure this is Fiend's greatest album, and it probably could have done with a change of pace here and there just to break things up a little, but three classics - Want It All, Thugg'n and Drugg'n, and Oprah - are nothing to be sniffed at, particularly as part of an album conspicuously lacking in weak material, and one that still sounds so different to others of its kind.

We Can't Be Stopped (1998)

I gave up listening to rap fairly early on in its development. I had liked Grandmaster Flash, Whodini, the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy and those guys, but for some reason LL Cool J just seemed to represent a good idea taken too far in the wrong direction with all else following along like seagulls in the wake of a trawler. I can no longer remember why LL Cool J in particular should have represented my cut off point, but the whole enterprise just seemed to be getting too goofy, and I was tired of being asked to put my hands in the air and wave them as though viewing the act with absolute indifference, and that same fucking drum machine over and over...

De La Soul sounded interesting, although not enough to make me want to buy an album; and NWA sounded terrifying in a fairly interesting way, but by 1990 it seemed obvious that rap had become too wide and too complex to be understood at a glance by a relative outsider such as myself. Unfortunately this left me with very little fresh listening material as that with which I was more comfortable had, generally speaking, begun to turn to shit during the nineties with the refitting of proper music as a series of jangly consumer options. Where once we'd had Wire, Crass, Joy Division, Siouxsie & the Banshees, Bill Nelson or whoever - to name but five off the top of my head - now there was the Beautiful South, Oasis, Supergrass, Björk, the Levellers, the Boo Radleys, Primal Scream and a million other horrible box-ticking wankers all queueing up to provide the sort of mechanically reclaimed lifestyle soundtrack that shifted T-shirts and got crowds punching the air without sounding too dissonant when used to advertise car insurance. Suddenly it was okay to listen to ELO again, and I found myself increasingly driven into a corner desperately clutching a few albums by Foetus, Nocturnal Emissions, and the three other people in the world still doing something that didn't sound like the musical equivalent to an episode of My Family.

I needed a complete change, something as far removed from four white guys with guitars as possible. I didn't want to end up as one of those persons wistfully pulling a Simple Minds album from its sleeve and telling his guests I'm an eighties man. I wanted to be able to slap on a newly purchased record and find myself staring open-mouthed at the speakers wondering what the hell I was hearing; and much like the guy who sang the theme from Friends, rap was there for me. It probably helped that rap was what people at work listened to, not so much because they tried to bring me into the fold or bothered to lend me anything they thought I might like, just that they provided a precedent. I bought Foxy Brown's Chyna Doll album more or less on the grounds that it wasn't by the White Stripes - or the Shite Stripes as I call them hur hur hur - and looking at the cover in the store, I found it impossible to imagine what the thing would sound like.

It actually sounded pretty fucking great, and even better, it featured what I later came to recognise as a fairly typical quota of guest performers, others whose work I could chase up in my quest for aural stimulation; which led to a couple of CDs by Mia X, and in turn to whatever else I could find on the No Limit label.

No Limit were a revelation to me, a stable of New Orleans rappers sharing the same production team, and churning out disc after disc of stuff that wasn't really like anything I'd heard before, and all with these bizarre covers by Pen & Pixel graphics, sharp dressed photoshopped rap persons eating diamonds for breakfast cereal - designs perpetrated without concessions to taste or subtlety by people who probably didn't quite know what they were doing but still had one hell of a time doing it; and the records sounded like they were made in the same spirit, like the fruit of a journey that began with the words well, let's turn this thing on and see what the fuck happens.

We Can't Be Stopped dates roughly from the heyday of No Limit records and is reasonably representative - a uniquely varied line up of landmark rappers of whom at least three or four existed pretty much in stylistic fields of their own, notably Fiend and Mr. Serv-On; and the music is typically all over the shop, probably composed mostly in Cubase or some similar programme, disparate elements joyfully slapped together just to see how they'll sound, cheesy old Roland drum machines pinging away next to piano, brushed snares, pizzicato strings, and all sorts of things that just shouldn't be served on the same plate. One great thing about No Limit was that even when their Beats by the Pound production team were quite obviously responding to someone asking for a track that sounds like that song by so and so, the end result more often than not goes somewhere else entirely. There's an almost amateur feel, the outsider art of rap, but done with such enthusiasm that it can't help but sound weird and great and absolutely fresh - I mean fresh as in new, by the way, but the other meaning is fine too.

Sadly, it wasn't long after We Can't Be Stopped came out that Master P, No Limit CEO, made the grave mistake of listening to his critics and turned the label into a spent force more or less overnight, shedding most of the roster's talent in a doomed effort to keep up with the times and emulate those newer artists who had spent most of the nineties vainly trying to duplicate his success. Some of the artists here went on to better things - not least Fiend, the definitive bullfrog of rap and a personal all time favourite - but the golden age was over. It turned out some of them could be stopped, none of which changes that this collection still sounds great more than a decade later, still full of surprises. If this stuff hadn't come along at just the right time as evidence in support that there will always be new things under the sun providing you know where to look, my own listening habits would probably still be stuck back in 1989.