The Best of Schoolly D (1990)

 

I assume we all remember Schoolly D as the guy generally credited with inventing gangsta rap, and while there's a thin line to be drawn because nobody could possibly mistake The Message - to name but one - for Oops Upside Your Head, it's doubtful that NWA, Compton's Most Wanted, Ice-T and others would have sounded quite as they did without the influence of this guy, both in subject matter and its delivery; but as with almost everything, history gets in the way meaning gangsta rap has become a misleading description at best. Even if he's pulling a face, these records are mainly about good times with a liberal seasoning of reality, simply meaning that gangs, shags, and getting off one's tits on illegal substances are an inevitable part of the equation - which is refreshing in the wake of all those rap records about how you could go to college, or at least help an old lady across the road and refrain from being such a Negative Neddy*. Positivity doesn't have to be an inherently bad thing, but we're drowning in it right now and it doesn't seem to be helping.

In addition to being a whole shitload more fun than you may have been led to believe through overexposure to the 50 Cent back catalogue, these singles (plus a couple of early album tracks) may not sound quite as expected. Hip-hop moves on like no other genre, sonically speaking, filling as it goes an ever expanding circus tent with the latest incarnations of old school, as though all that went before is known, done, all over, and at best just a helpful footnote to where we are now. The twelve tracks included here are mostly just a guy rapping over a drum machine with scratching - grooves not tunes, and not even much in the way of sampling. It's minimal when you look at the credits, but it sure doesn't sound that way. I still vividly remember getting to piss about with my first proper eighties drum machine - a Yamaha RX15 owned by Steve McGarrigle, and one of the first to use samples. It seemed amazing what you could do with the thing, and even more amazing what came out of the speakers despite such memories having since been tarnished by all the shitty futuristic haircut acts of the decade hammering that thing into the ground. The difference is that whatever they're using on this stuff - and it's something very similar - still sounds as powerful and fresh and exciting as I remember, like the world's funkiest bailiff kicking in your front door - somehow in a good way. I suspect this may be thanks to DJ Code Money who additionally fills the remaining space with a tapestry of the finest scratching you'll hear, riffs, parps, squeaks, burps and scribbles forming a powerfully atmospheric embellishment to the microphone without ever quite committing to a tune. It's rare to hear music which seems to do so little and yet sounds so fucking massive that it would kill you in an instant if it fell on you.

Time for a giant fuck-off sized bronze statue of the man in one of those parks, I'd say, should anyone from Philadelphia city council happen to be reading.

*: Turn that Frown Upside Down, You Miserable Fucker by Afrika Bambaataa & Positive Life Tabernacle being one example of the subgenre that I've just made up.

50 Cent - Get Rich or Die Tryin' (2003)

Now that I'm more than one-hundred years old, the majority of the music I own will be, by definition, stuff which I haven't listened to in a while, because even listening to an average five or six albums a day, there will inevitably be records which have settled, so to speak. Usually this means I get to rediscover these misplaced waxings and enjoy them all over again, and sometimes I discover qualities I didn't even notice on previous occasions and enjoy them all the more, but every so often there's an exception. The last time I tried to listen to Curtis - 50 Cent's third album, of which I had no memory and had forgotten I owned - it was hard work getting through the thing, which at least explained why I'd barely played it, and left me with the impression that he probably wasn't worth bothering with beyond that classic debut, Get Rich or Die Tryin' - with no g at the end because that's how tough guys speak, see.

Time hasn't done this one any favours either. In Da Club and 21 Questions still sound okay, I guess, and I assume the rest was once provided by how new and different it seemed at the time - now devalued in currency thanks to everything since sounding more or less like this: rap for the airwaves or the shitty little speaker on your wanky phone with da club relegated to a subject, just a hook. 50 Cent half raps, half sings, as his critics have so often pointed out, but it's more that he speaks a tune while the beats just kind of shimmer and chug in the background. Strip the vocal from a few of these and it would be anyone's guess where or who they were pitched at.

Lyrically he places himself as the third of a holy trinity behind Nas and Jay-Z, just as certain presidents will tell you what a great job they're doing which, I feel, lacks objectivity and is therefore an unreliable quantifier of worth; and 50 Cent, or Fiddy as I've no doubt hyper-talented NME writers of the day knew him, isn't terrible, but beyond the vague novelty of his speaking tunes, I have a tough time thinking of anyone less lyrical until we get to early nineties garage MCs. This is one of those guys who isn't above repeating a word at the end of two consecutive lines and so rhyming it with itself; which would be okay, except an entire album of I've shot tons of blokes in the face and the cops didn't do nuffink because I am really, really hard and that and nothing else is kind of witless; and a token track for the ladies amounting to how pet, you can suck my dick if you like doesn't really bring thematic variety. I loves me some ign'ant as much as anyone, but even rap's most celebrated cavemen can usually work a moral into the body count, something from which we might learn, or something cinematic at least - an angle which distinguishes it from being the same fucking thing over and over in a monotone with notes. Fiddy's delivery is possibly calculated to suggest the detachment of a killer—excuse me, I mean a killa, but it makes him sound like he's zonked out on dope, which is perhaps why this one was a lot more fun for him than for me.

Snoop Dogg - Missionary (2024)

I don't know if anyone could have foreseen a new Snoop album on Death Row given at least a couple of decades of exhausting bullshit from the label's previous owner. It's probably not such a surprise that the aforementioned former owner filed for bankruptcy in 2006 and the label has been changing hands ever since, existing mainly for the sake of collecting royalties on former glories. It could have been different - cut those losses, maybe put some effort into promoting Rage's album, maybe make something of having Kurupt, Above the Law and Crooked I on the books rather than wasting all that time on pot shots launched at former employees; but no, so never mind. Not only do we have brand new Snoop on Death Row - because he bought the label - but it's produced by Dr. Dre.

I somehow lost track of Snoop, the most recent one I own being Ego Trippin' which came out in (cough) 2008 because apparently I haven't had my finger on anything resembling a pulse for some time. I don't know that he's ever done a bad album, but the last few I heard didn't particularly grab me in a major way - nothing I regret buying, but sometimes you have to be in the right mood. So I'm hearing Missionary as a comeback by virtue of my having failed to notice the hundred or so albums he's squeezed out since I've been living in the same country. Musically it's more traditional than Dre's Compton, taking the perfectionist excess in an entirely different direction so it's almost like big band music of the sixties through a hip-hop filter, a big, brassy sound built from an entire orchestra's worth of high-definition instrumentation conveying the full range of jazzy moods. It wouldn't work were it not conducted with such an expert hand, and so the blend of John Barry scale with street level lyricism and all the funky electronics you would hope for, is honestly breathtaking. Also, Snoop himself is more lyrical than I've heard him in a while - which admittedly may be my failing to pay attention - but here he reminds us why we've heard of him in the first place, beyond his sharing a cell with Martha Stewart or mugging to the camera during the Olympics. Even 50 Cent sounds decent on this record.

First the bee population of the UK is proven to be on the increase, then Snoop releases a new album on Death Row, and I'm taking both of these as signs. Perhaps things are looking up at long fucking last, despite some unusually shitty elephants in the room.

2Pac - Loyal to the Game (2004)

This return visit has been inspired by Eminem. I'd picked up a copy of Eminem's Kamikaze at CD Exchange and, as with most of his albums, it's good, even great, and almost a classic but not quite; and it occurred to me that it's strange how such a genuinely phenomenal lyricist and top shelf beatmaker has never quite delivered a classic album where even Spice 1 - off the top of my head - has at least four to his name; although admittedly I haven't listened to Infinite in a while, so it's probably that one if it's any of them. With every single album, Eminem always comes so close but somehow never quite gets there, and it's taken me a long fucking time to work out why that might be, or why I think that might be. It's the combination of his delivery with his beats - inordinately complex sprinkles of finely tuned particles, single syllables picking at the line in a sort of dizzying pizzicato which demands that the listener keep up; and which is dropped to a beat which often does something very similar but in musical terms, again with the pizzicato but this time as notes plucked over what may as well be the soundtrack to a silent movie illustrating the bad guy creeping tippy-toe up those stairs with an evil pantomime grin on his face. That's how it sounds to me anyway, and to break the problem down into basic English, the music and the delivery do roughly the same thing and so lack the sort of sonic contrast needed to make the thing work, or at least to make it work as it probably should; and I base this theory on 2Pac's Loyal to the Game which posthumously assembles Shakur's lines over beats provided by Eminem, and which is generally fucking fantastic and certainly a potentially classic album.

At the risk of enraging basement dwelling representatives of the fully intact cherry community, 2Pac was never the greatest lyricist of all time. He had an amazing delivery, stuff worth saying, and certainly qualifies as a great, but he was never the greatest; and while those first few albums might justifiably be termed classic and the rest are mostly decent, his posthumous reputation seems out of all proportion, not least because those posthumous albums have been pretty damn patchy, sprawling double disc sets presumably released as such so as to make the most of what few genuinely memorable tracks emerged from the final sessions. I get the impression that 2Pac's last months may have been mostly compulsive studio work, heavy dope paranoia, and hardly any sleep because that's how those albums sound. They're worth a listen, but they can be hard work and the beats, with one or two exceptions, are fucking terrible - bland karaoke funk which may as well have been lifted from the closing credits of low budget cop shows.

Whether by accident or design, as producer, Eminem's mission statement here seems to have been to finish 2Pac's legacy on a high note, something which at least reminds us how much we loved 2Pacalypse Now and Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z. So Em's plinky-plonky Addams Family themes are here contrasted with a quite different sort of vocal, 2Pac's driven yet leisurely cruise through whatever was on his mind that day; and the combination is dynamite, bringing out the best of everyone. To be fair, it's kind of a weird listen, not least for pairing 2Pac with the likes of Obie Trice, Lloyd Banks, 50 Cent and others who were probably still propping up the walls of technical colleges back when 2Pac and Alanis Morissette were talking about opening that restaurant together; and it's weirder that 2Pac calls out his posthumous collaborators by name even as their own verses refer directly to his passing. I'd heard that Eminem hired a 2Pac impersonator for those beyond the grave shout outs, or else indulged in some sort of improbable tape wizardry, but it maybe doesn't matter because the joins are invisible and the whole thing hangs together beautifully, regardless of the potential time paradox. A few of these tracks are sort of familiar, with vocals lifted from existing recordings, or variant takes thereof, but Loyal to the Game nevertheless feels like a real living, breathing album rather than something scraped off the cutting room floor. It's emotionally powerful, intelligent, inspiring, and without all the exhausting beef of those posthumous Death Row releases; and is as such probably closer to how we need to remember the guy.

We should probably also keep in mind that this is the sort of thing Eminem is capable of when he has his eye on the ball, which is pretty impressive and should definitely count for a classic album. As though to illustrate the strength of Eminem's vision here, we end with four bonus tracks from fellow producers, not least among whom would be Scott Storch; and if they range from great to more of what we had on those Death Row discs, they sound so out of place as to belong to something else.

Contrary to the protests of certain nutcases, I still say he was a very naughty boy rather than the actual messiah, but Loyal to the Game at least stands as a memorial to what was so great about the guy before the picture got distorted.

Ja Rule - Pain is Love (2001)

Although my fingers have been conspicuously absent from anything which could be identified as the pulse for a long time, I have the impression of Ja Rule remembered as some third string also ran who shuffled off into obscurity following lyrical beatdowns from Eminem, 50 Cent, and others. My understanding is that it began with 50 Cent making a record upon which it was suggested that he'd seen Ja Rule do a poo in his pants in the queue at dinnertime and that he then saw Ja Rule put his hand into his pants to touch the poo and then Ja Rule sniffed his fingers and looked pleased; and 50 Cent made the record because that's the sort of record by which he customarily elevated his public profile and accordingly hit sales targets. Ja Rule retaliated, and then everyone else got sucked in. Eminem got to take a few lyrical potshots at someone harder than Morris Minor & the Majors, so that made for a nice change; and The Source magazine suddenly and coincidentally decided that Ja Rule was the true legit 4 lyfe face of da realness 'n' shit; and Death Row's Suge Knight weighed in, because obviously we'd all been wondering what his take on the situation would be - and his take was something about Dr. Dre being a homosexual and how Tupac would have loved Ja Rule had he not snuffed it, what with Suge having been established as the official organ of Tupac's legacy 4 real + tru 2 da streetz IDT.

It's all bollocks really. Ja Rule was never the next Tupac, if such a thing were ever required; and even if he was just one of many frowning tattooed baldies with shirt allergies who came to the fore in the late nineties, it's not like he didn't have enough of his own thing going on. Expecting generic rap landfill, I remember being shocked at how good this album was when Rodney Dell lent it to me; and I've finally picked up a copy for myself, and it still sounds way above the average.

Rule always reminded me of DMX more than Tupac, although admittedly there's not much in it, and the latter posthumously guests on So Much Pain, should anyone need to make the comparison. I must admit, on first hearing the track, I thought fuck, they were right, he really does sound like a Tupac impersonator, which I suppose means that he actually really doesn't, so that's good to know. Lyrically, Rule falls short of amazing, but he's decent - at least as much as 50 Cent ever was and without having to talk about what happened in the queue at dinnertime; and he can work up a mood as powerful as anyone with that bluesy growl.

What really makes Pain is Love is the contrast of the aforementioned bluesy growl with Irv Gotti's razor sharp and criminally underrated production - an elegant update of certain Motown era beats using a sampler without any of its usual angularity, resulting in songs which throb with life and sounded fucking great on the radio with no hint of compromise. Therefore fuck da haterz 'n' shit.

G-Unit - 50 Cent is the Future (2006)

Well, it seems he wasn't the future after all, at least not in the way they meant it. The problem with 50 Cent was not that he destroyed quality rap and ushered in a new age of men reading out their bank statements over a Marvin Gaye sample, but that you couldn't get away from the fucker. He was everywhere. He even presented Gardener's Question Time at one point. Ain't that some shit.

50 Cent rose to infamy with How To Rob on which he named names and threatened to take dinner money from more or less every other rapper going. It was an entertaining list which happened to rhyme and served to piss off enough people - mostly those identified - to garner some attention; then he got shot in the face, took a year or so out to get his act back together, and returned to the spotlight when Eminem needed someone scary to be seen stood next to. That probably wasn't quite how it happened, but it was how it looked. Suddenly he was everywhere, both solo and with G-Unit, turning up on everybody else's records, not quite acting in some seriously shitty films, interviews in magazines, on the box, photographed grinning whilst doing a poo into a toilet so molded as to resemble Ja Rule's face...

The backlash was inevitable, kicking off when that bloke out of Made Men, having failed to achieve fame either by his own records or shares in The Source magazine, decided to go after Eminem as an easy and newsworthy target, by association also drawing 50 Cent and Dr. Dre into the line of fire. They were selling too many records to the wrong sort of people, the argument ran, and their records were too crap, and the fact of Ray Benzino owning the magazine from which the loudest complaints were issued was just a coincidence. Genuine rap was not, it was suggested, some macho bullshit about blow jobs and ostentatiously spending a ton of money in the pub; and those who thought otherwise were destroying our culture, something from which Eminem should be expelled because he once made a record about some black bitches - his terms - which crossed lines of taste and judgement which had been sacrosanct up to that point. You'd never catch a true hip-hop artist making that sort of ditty. No sir.

So, it was difficult to really get any kind of impression of 50 Cent's actual worth - assuming for the sake of argument that he had any - what with all the shouting and the hype, and his bloody awful records. Well, maybe not all of them, but The Massacre was mostly shite, seeming almost like an attempt to make the album described in the very worst reviews of the previous one - which personally I thought was fairly listenable, all things considered. The appeal of 50 Cent is admittedly thin, and mostly to be found in the way he tells 'em rather than the thrust of what is said. He was never an amazing lyricist, but his delivery is good and he can be very funny, and this comes through much better on the stuff which appeared outside of the usual record company channels, mix-tapes such as this one for example.

It's a G-Unit album, but I guess they had no illusions as to which name was getting bums on seats, so it's mostly himself. Lloyd Banks is enough of a presence to maintain variety, not least because he's the one with some serious verbal dexterity, and then there's Tony Yayo presumably on here somewhere. Subjectwise, we're sticking to the kind of thing you'll probably be happy to hear if you're buying a 50 Cent album, much of which may cause frowning amongst those who never really liked rap in the first place, but then the record probably wasn't meant for them. What matters is that 50 Cent is the Future is a fucking great album regardless, in so much as that you slap it on and it comes out of the speakers and it sounds good. The beats are tight, summery and soulful with just enough of a scowl to keep it from dropping into the whole food store to pick up mung beans; and it sounds like something coming out of a radio on a hot day when you're feeling good. The lyrics are a chortle, or at least they are to me - guns, hoes, crack and all the usual of course, but not really as lifestyle advice, more like stories told, and even when you know it's complete bullshit, you can still appreciate the tale, even feel good for those involved in the telling. The parts may not look like much on paper, but the whole is much greater than the sum.

Dayton Family - What's On My Mind? (1995)

When my music tastes began to expand in such a way roughly amounting to my switching to rap to the exclusion of everything else for more or less a decade, it didn't take me too long to work out that there wasn't much point paying attention to anything said in Melody Maker or other music papers catering to fans of Oasis and Primal Scream. The good stuff, whatever form it might take, probably wasn't going to be the sort of thing which would appeal to someone fancying a change of tone from a steady diet of Jarvis Cocker and that bloke who wrote the Father Ted theme tune. Happily both Tower Records and Maestro in Peckham carried issues of Murder Dog, an American import covering the sort of thing which had drawn my interest, and that was where I first heard of the Dayton Family, amongst other regional acts failing to make significant inroads into the fanbase of  Thousand Yard Stare.

Lacking an internet, I was obliged to buy my music from shops in the form of round things, which placed certain limits on what I could get hold of; so when this turned up in the racks of Rat Records in Camberwell, before I'd even got to the third syllable of holy shit I'd already bought the thing; and I was not disappointed.

The Dayton Family were named after Dayton Avenue in the city of Flint, Michigan, one of those urban strips concerning which the first ten Google hits will be posts on forums advising you against going there under any circumstances. Needless to say, whilst many of the tracks on this album describe life on Dayton Avenue, not many are likely to end up as soundtrack to television commercials for real estate or urban development. This is because the Dayton Family are, it could be argued, fucking terrifying.

It may not surprise you to learn that the album is probably not for you if you dislike sex, violence, or swearing as themes, because specifically What's On My Mind? speaks principally to other folks living on either the same street or one of equivalent shittiness. In case the usual disclaimer is necessary, it's an amoral glorification of everything you might be scared of in the same way that an episode of The Wire constitutes an inspirational testament to the economic benefits of investment in the crack industry. As may be obvious, this is some angry shit, gangsta for sure, and yet it steers a path between the righteous moral fortitude of Public Enemy and the fully ign'ant fury of NWA. In fact, once you take the beats into account, you may notice that What's On My Mind? is very much its own thing.

Steve Pitts production is hard and sharp, uncluttered and thus leaving plenty of room for bluesy stabs of electric piano kept in line by the relentless pulse of tinny drum machines underpinned with a ton of bass. It has an oddly organic feel for something so mercilessly programmed, even on those few basic tracks which could almost have sprung from a couple of Roland boxes rigged together. It would be g-funk but for hints at some sort of gangstafied version of the theme from Mission: Impossible.

Of course, what makes the album are the Dayton Family themselves, three angry guys and not a weak link between them, all shouting a variation on the same machine gun delivery, hardly a pause for breath and not a syllable left unused; and all this hitting you in the face for about an hour, as exhausting and exhilarating as running from the cops - probably - if you've ever had to do that sort of thing, and obviously I haven't. Lyrically they may not be big on acrobatics but the power of the stories is overwhelming:

A lot is on my mind, there's a lot of pressure pressing me.
America and it's system, I figure that they testing me.
I fall and catch myself, falling in my wisdom,
Daddies raping daughters and having sex with them,
My mother's turning tricks, and I'm no keener I know,
My sister had a baby and she's eating off the floor.
I'm going through a thang.
My mind's about to crack.
Somebody took my sack.
I gots to take it back.

See? If you can't tell the difference between that and 50 Cent talking about what a great party he just went to and how they had cake and everything, then you're an idiot. The ancestry of What's On My Mind? may not be obvious within the first couple of listens, but it's nevertheless your basic hard, grinding blues in response to the modern equivalent of whatever was pissing off those guys way back whenever, stories which really need to be told rather than lifestyle advice, and this is a classic album of its kind. Those who would disagree are doubtless welcome to pop over to Dayton Avenue, Flint, and take it up with someone there.

Yeah - I didn't think so.

The Madd Rapper - Tell Em Why U Madd (1999)

...which brings us to skits on rap albums. Aren't they just the best!?

Sadly no, which is odd considering that rap as a genre generally has a fairly well developed sense of humour, and so much so that I would suggest that humour of one stripe or another is pretty much an essential ingredient of the form, unless you're Lauryn Hill or someone. It is therefore puzzling - at least to me - why skits on rap albums are usually so fucking embarrassing. The prize for the worst probably goes to C-Murder whose comedy turns have mostly been on the level of a hapless fan phoning him in the middle of the night to which our man quips suck my dick, punk ass motherfucker, with hilarious consequences. Ha ha. Even Ice Cube, whom one might ordinarily credit with at least a modicum of wit, has been known to shoot himself in the big red clown's shoe despite the assistance of Chris Rock who actually causes mirth for a living. I'm thinking here of the skit in which Rock plays some sort of punk ass motherfucker trying to get in on Cube's not unimpressive game, washing his car badly or something of that sort and with hilarious consequences. Rock is genuinely funny, but the effect is spoiled by Mr. Cube sneering punk ass motherfucker just in case we listeners were too stupid to realise that Chris Rock was playing the role of a punk ass motherfucker in pursuit of comedy chuckles. We might of course have misunderstood and thought that Rock's incoherently yelping character was a real cool dude, but no, Mr. Cube sets us straight by identifying him, as stated, as a punk ass motherfucker so as to make absolutely certain that we get the joke. Great.

Surprisingly, the oeuvre of Puff Daddy - which is what he's still called so far as I'm concerned - for all its faults, fares generally quite well in terms of wacky interludes, most of which manage to at least raise a chortle even if we're not exactly in the realm of crying whilst banging ours fist on the floor. The Madd Rapper, for the sake of argument, emerged as a running joke on various Bad Boy albums, a character brought in to complain about whoever album he was appearing on, to generally more amusing effect than you might anticipate. I could be remembering this wrong but I seem to recall reports of Bad Boy producer Deric Angelettie, usually trading as D-Dot, being pretty pissed off when someone outed him as the secret identity of the Madd Rapper. This seemed odd as I thought it had been common knowledge for a while, and it wasn't like he'd really gone to any great lengths to cover his tracks; and with the best will in the world, The Madd Rapper was never going to be the hip-hop answer to the Residents, because were there ever such a thing it would have been much stranger and would almost certainly have involved Kool Keith. But anyway...

An entire album from the Madd Rapper, Madd spelt with two Ds just to up the wackiness to the level of a bumper sticker reading don't follow me - I'm lost too! Just how good was it going to be?

Astonishingly, it's actually pretty decent. I suppose this shouldn't be too surprising given that D-Dot has been behind some of the crunchier Bad Boy tracks, but rhyming - as opposed to just gurgling angrily between numbers on a Puffy album - he's pretty tight and with a distinctive voice. The beats are doubtless very much New York at the end of the last century, caught somewhere between turntable and sampler - punchy kick drums, skipping pace and a nice deep bass kept simple, orchestral stabs and grimy piano loops promising that it will be a great day in the big city, but you should probably wrap up warm. It isn't jazz by any description, but it has some of that feel.

Anyway, last century or not, it still sounds great to me. This being a producer's album, there's a ton of guests, which keeps it moving along although probably wasn't strictly necessary as Madd holds his own with the best of them - Raekwon, Black Rob, Ma$e, Eminem when he was funny, and even the pre-fame-and-shooting 50 Cent whose How To Rob promises a hell of a lot more than he eventually delivered on albums comprising bank statements read out over sampled gunfire. That said, the assembled lyricists of D-Dot's own Crazy Cat stable are featured heavily for obvious reasons, and whilst none of them are exactly bad, most of them may as well be those members of Murder Inc. who weren't either Ja Rule or the lady with the nice hair, whatever her name was. They're okay, but nothing that shines too bright, although at least none of them are Jermaine Dupri, the stumpy capitalist who is called in to ruin only one of these tracks with the usual whiny voiced crap about his wallet and his penis.

Tell Em Why U Madd presents itself as the rap Barron Knights probably because no-one told it not to, but turns out to be a thumping good set for the most part, and not really a comedy album, or at least no more so than any rap album you care to mention is a comedy album. Come to think of it, it's probably a significant improvement on most of the records this guy has made for other people.