The Game - Jesus Piece (2012)

The Game had squirted out an entire stack of great albums by this point, not one dud amongst them, but I always had the feeling they should have been better. The problem was in the whole, with only the verbiage exposing any obvious weakness, and not in the acrobatics or even the delivery. It was the obsession with making a classic album, which is fine because no-one sets out to make a stinker, but the endless references to Ready to Die, Illmatic, Reasonable Doubt and others in terms of legendary discs which might shuffle aside to make room for this one became a bit exhausting, and he only got away with it because he sounded aspirational rather than arrogant. The endless references to records by other people became off-putting, despite the initial novelty. I once sat down with the first album and started on a list of every fan-pleasing reference made to someone else's work. I seem to remember getting to fifty or sixty before the end of the first track, at which juncture the exercise struck me as a complete waste of time. If it was a lovely day, it was a lovely day like Bill Withers. If he'd bought a brand new combine harvester you just knew he'd spent the best part of a morning searching for something to rhyme with Wurzels, because that what it be like.

Jesus Piece is his fifth album, apparently a concept jobbie exploring religious themes and how they relate to this shitty world in which we find ourselves, which I'd argue runs through most of the Game's music, although here it's more direct because we don't have to wade through references to Nas, Biggie, Jay-Z and the rest; and this greater focus, denuded of all crowd pleasing waffle, reveals a  strong lyricist delivering heartbreaking home truths with an emotional investment comparable to Ghostface. I don't know if he's ever broken down in tears on stage, but he's one of the few who could probably get away with it.

Musically, it's likewise on point, with no evidence of whatever deficit may or may not have kept previous albums from quite getting there. Being 2012, there's a lot of that post-trap sound, whatever the fuck you call it - the thing that sounds like waveforms copied and pasted from track to track on a screen which will eventually emerge from someone's shitty phone - but it has an organic groove, like headachey rainbow breakfast cereal somehow cooked up without recourse to artificial ingredients; and the sound is like something vast and distant which inhabits a cathedral more than just the usual reverb wacked up too high. Even with the earthier monologues, it's sunny and soulful music for scorching weather and wide blue skies despite the pathos, the lines drenched in sorrow, regret, or the recognition of insurmountable odds. The majority of rap albums usually leave you feeling one of two or three things, while Jesus Piece delivers every available emotion all at once regardless of contradictions - and the title track in particular is a Mona Lisa moment in rap terms. It may have taken him time to build up momentum, but I'd say this one probably does rank alongside Ready to Die, Illmatic, and the rest.

Eminem - Revival (2017)

Without bothering to do my research, I gather this was Eminem's comeback album - or possibly one of them - and was as such subject to major slagging from whatever it is that we now have which tells us whether a record is good or bad. This is what I take from listening to Kamikaze and Music to Be Murdered By, the albums which followed Revival. Of course, given Eminem's tendency to wax bitterly about how everyone hated the previous record but can nevertheless suck his dick, I don't know how much reality supports the impression I've formed because I have only the music itself to go on - which is maybe as it should be.

I have a lot of time for Eminem and have been dutifully buying each one more or less as it comes out. That said, I honestly don't believe he's the greatest MC of all time, and while he's never put out a substandard record, I'm not sure he's ever quite unleashed an all-time classic in the sense of Ready to Die, Illmatic, or Revenge of the Barracuda - although admittedly that last one may well be according to just me and WC's mum.

To take these proposals in turn, the idea of there being a single greatest MC of all time strikes me as ridiculous* given that it would entail comparisons between rappers with very little stylistic common ground beyond residence in the same unusually broad arena; and because it would mean you'd have to ask fucking stupid questions such as whether Eminem is better than Ghostface or Jadakiss, for just two of many examples. The most we can say, surely, is simply that some lyricists are great, some are less great, and some are not conspicuously great. Our man patently belongs in the upper reaches of the first bunch.

Secondly, while he has a string of great albums to his name, I don't think there's one which didn't have at least a little room for improvement in some respect. Mostly it's been a certain homogeneity across the seventy minutes of each album - or however long they are - because even genius can get a bit repetitive when it's doing the same thing for more than an hour. As I believe is fairly well established by this point, Eminem has a stylistic leaning towards the confessional and unusually personal, hence all those cuts about how you were wrong about the previous album, you cloth-eared dumbfuck, and hence his entire familial life and the drama it has entailed narrated for our consideration, blow by blow, over the last couple of decades. I've sometimes felt the confessional focus has bordered on indulgent - like all those fucking autobiographical nineties indie comics about what it's like to write and draw an indie comic - but it's what Eminem does, and honestly he does it well, so there doesn't seem to be much point in grousing about it. Either you like it or you don't. To my ears, it's mostly been his own production which has been the problem - often great tracks in isolation, but a full hour of those plinky-plonky Addams Family beats can get on your nerves after a while.

Anyway, whatever it was, Revival gets everything right leaving no room for doubt. The beats have moved on from the Slim Shady sound, not quite throwing Em's lot in with the trap crowd, but close enough as to at least sound involved in the present state of the art, at least as of 2017; and it probably helps that Rick Rubin was involved. He's still fucking with that stadium rap thing where choruses tend to invoke a skyful of lighters, and suddenly it makes more sense than it did on previous albums. The jokes are still funny or horrible - depending on your mileage - and the familiar confessional is seasoned with pointed rage over the previous year's election and all which has since spilled forth from its bright orange diaper; so Revival does more than just one thing for an entire hour, and where it does anything familiar, it does it better than the last time we heard it. I genuinely believe this one might be up there with Illmatic and the rest.

*: Even including Rakim here, regardless of the views of elderly white men who haven't listened to rap since 1991 and yet who feel somehow qualified to opine on the same in statements habitually suffixed with in my humble opinion, despite that it never is.

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.

RA the Rugged Man - Die, Rugged Man, Die (2004)

Casting my mind back to 2004, I vaguely recall RA's debut being greeted with the rolling of eyes and shaking of heads - not exactly the full thumbs down, but something along the lines of why now? RA was set to be the next big thing for about five minutes back before I was even looking in the right direction - presumably around the time he was hanging out with Biggie and trading lines with the same on the delightfully named Cunt Renaissance; and then suddenly nothing happened for the next ten years, meaning the debut also served as the comeback album, a bit. RA seems to blame himself for this, or maybe not blame so much as simply accept the fact of his being the eternal square peg in a round hole. Die, Rugged Man, Die gives a disgustingly thorough account of the lad's face failing to fit, additionally providing testimony as to the massive injustice of this given that he pisses over most other lyricists, possibly literally in a few cases. It's funny. In fact it's bed-wettingly funny without it even being clear whether the guy is joking; if he's joking.

The beats have got that underground thump of classic material, and RA keeps it so real that you're either going to have to buy a new one or just get used to the smell. I don't know how to describe this monster without getting it horribly wrong, because some of it is fucking appalling, but fucking appalling in a good way, which I wasn't even sure could be a thing. My fellow old age pensioners may recall that Kiss had their adventures immortalised in their own Marvel comic back in the seventies, and that each member of Kiss famously donated a quota of blood so that it could be added to the ink prior to printing. I'm not well informed as to the process by which vinyl and CD are manufactured, whether either medium is originated from the kind of vat of raw material into which an enterprising recording artist might take a massive dump, thematically underscoring their work with the physical material of its transmission; and if it's possible, if I didn't just listen to it, then I feel certain that RA has at least given it some thought.

Yes. That good!

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.

Mobb Deep - The Infamous (1995)

I was kind of off the New York MCs for a while back there, mainly because every last one of them sounded like he was gargling about a pint of liquid bogies up in the back of his schnozzle, and it all seemed to blend into a generic snotty whine of some slightly bored sounding guy telling you either that his pants just fell down or that he's actually the richest man who ever lived, punctuated with sniffles. With hindsight I realise that my ear was simply pointed in the wrong direction for a couple of months, that being the direction in which one finds Noreaga, but it was enough to unfortunately dim the appeal of Mobb Deep. I'd heard them guest on other people's tracks, and whilst I could sort of see they had some use, I imagined a whole album would probably be weighed down with bogie action and would almost certainly feature a couple of tracks where the rapping was reduced to just coughing and sneezing, maybe a few of those farts you only ever hear when someone is on their death bed with the sound of some guy sobbing quietly in the background; all of which just goes to show how wrong you can be.

Musically this one represents Mobb Deep when they were at their best by my duly schooled reckoning, at their most darkly atmospheric - not quite the smokey monochrome of the jazz basement at four in the morning so much as being stood outside it in the pissing rain and freezing cold. The beats are right up front with the music as something heard in the distance, a broken piano, an echoing horn or some speaker cracking bass pumped out of a car at the lights three blocks away. For something with so few components, it's astonishing how much it does; and for something which sounded like quite a few other things from the same era - particularly as produced by Large Professor and the RZA - it's astonishing how this sounds so much like it's own thing, and how little it sounds like an album recorded two decades ago.

This is probably down to subject matter, namely the timeless theme of life kicking you in the teeth over and over, which is unfortunately as valid today as it ever was; and carries particular conviction here as Mobb Deep always sounded like they hadn't eaten for three days; and if such a description still doesn't quite do it, you can sort of reverse engineer Sleaford Mods back to this album providing you don't mind a wholesale swapping around of all the cultural references. If nothing else it at least makes more sense than Sleaford Mods as the Fall fronted by John Cooper Clarke or whatever it is this week.

As is probably obvious, it didn't take me too long to realise I was just listening to the wrong stuff where New York was concerned, and The Infamous was amongst the more simultaneously terrifying and exciting affirmations of this realisation. Twenty years later it still sounds like one of the hardest records ever made, definitely in rap terms, and certainly up there with Illmatic, Ready to Die and other more generally willingly acknowledged masterpieces. Survival of the Fittest, Temperature's Rising and Shook Ones would alone be enough to support its status, but there's a whole hour of this seriously hungry shit, and every last toot and fart of such power as to make the act of writing about it more or less redundant.

Black Rob - Life Story (2000)

As I see it, the problem with rap and hip-hop is that for a genre which stacks so much currency on keeping it real, it's often a struggle to get at the music through all those layers of hype and bullshit, although that's probably not so much to do with those involved as a consequence of it being the only music anyone was still buying for a few years back there, roughly speaking. Hype and bullshit can be harmless or even amusing with some genres - long haired men in leather jackets pulling scary faces and claiming to have once helped install a new filtration pump at Satan's very own pool - but with rap, it's frankly embarrassing. At one extreme you had Tim Westwood's monthly top ten of guzzling street thumpaz (or some such drivel) in HHC magazine as was, the one that stood out for me being his verdict on Fiesta by R.Kelly and Jadakiss: A street hustler with an R&B thug, Timothy opined helpfully, now that's gangsta! Well, if  anyone knows what's gangsta!, I guess it would be the Reverend Timothy seeing as how he was raised in the mean streets of Harlem and forced to slang weight at an early age, as opposed to being bummed flat in some English private school paid for by wealthy ecclesiastic parents who never seemed to get shout outs on his crappy show for some strange reason; too busy keeping it real I suppose.

At the other end of the scale are the spiritual Guradian readers insisting that real hip-hop sounds like something recorded by DJ Premier in 1992, and that it hangs out in vegan coffee shops and refrains from use of disrespectful sexist language because as homeopathic science has recently verified, each time a fake rapper uses the word bitch, a portion of the Amazonian rain forest is turned into McDonalds - fake rappers being those who, lacking the requisite fanbase of white middle-class recycling enthusiasts, are reduced to selling their CDs to black people and dispossessed urban crackers.

Chuck D once made some observation about rap being the black CNN, which is sort of true, and so just as picking and choosing the news that happens to support one's own political bias makes no difference to all the other stuff that's going on, people telling you what hip-hop is are more often than not full of record-breaking quotas of shit.

Black Rob would probably be automatically disqualified in certain quarters by virtue of the Puffy association. Whilst it may be true that Puffy - or Puff Daddy, or Diddy, or Do Wah Puff Diddy Daddy, or whatever the hell he's calling himself this week - is not a man of easily quantified talents, it's unfair to suggest that his one skill lies in an ability to deposit royalty checks in a bank account. Furthermore, to suggest that the success of those artists he's fostered only serves to cement their crapness isn't any more useful or meaningful than the converse notion of record sales equating to quality. He's a decent enough producer, but his skill is probably more to do with being able to spot a winner, or at least a potential winner.

Black Rob failed to set the world on fire or to repeat the success of Notorious B.I.G, but Life Story is nevertheless a great album, and one that defies the received wisdom of its producer tending to churn out formulaic jewel-encrusted landfill. The music exemplifies hip-hop during its golden age, or probably silver age, or aluminium or something - well, whatever, the 1990s seemed to be when the form really expanded beyond the limited terms defined by worthy dullards telling you what hip-hop is, blossoming into a thousand weird and wonderful variations put together just for the sheer pleasure of making tracks resembling nothing anyone had heard before. I'm still not sure if this possibly rosy view is informed by the 1990s being when I first began listening to rap, or if that's when rap first caught my attention because it had finally moved beyond all that goofy cowbell crap asking people to stick their hands in the air, and then wave them as though the action gave them very little occasion for concern. Anyway, Life Story runs the gamut - whatever a gamut may be - from tracks sounding like a sampler breaking down, to the grime-encrusted New Yorky DJ Premier influenced stuff, to Puffy's signature machine gun Liberace mash-ups, let down only by borrowings from Slick Rick's Children's Story - which I always found tremendously irritating - and some pseudo-Latino tedium that was probably a hit for Madonna during those two decades when I wasn't looking; and of course it would be nothing without Black Rob himself, a distinctive gravel voice, a compelling story teller, and a man absolutely incapable of bullshit. As with much rap, calling it gangsta is missing the point regardless of supposedly agricultural language and occasional references to firearms, or the conspicuous absence of sermonising so beloved of wholefood fans. It may seem trite - although if it does, then screw you too - but Black Rob really is just a regular guy telling stories, never pretending to be anything other than that, and telling them well without losing his sense of humour. Life Story falls short of being the greatest rap album ever recorded, but it's nevertheless pretty damn strong, and constitutes a good square meal in lyrical terms.