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.

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.

Jay-Z - The Blueprint III (2009)

I kept tabs on Jay-Z right up until just before this album came out, then lost the thread due to moving house, moving country, and a load of other stuff happening all at the same time, not least being marriage. Once the dust had settled, I came across this in CD Exchange. It hadn't even occurred to me that he might have kept on putting out new material in my absence, particularly given the number of times he'd already announced his retirement. My hopes weren't high given that the last two had been pretty underwhelming, but what the fuck? I thought.

It didn't make much of an impression at first, which is why I've had The Blueprint III on my shelves for a couple of years and only now have I come to play it more than twice in the same week; and yet it made some impression because I kept listening, albeit infrequently. I've had both Kingdom Come and American Gangster significantly longer and still couldn't tell you a single thing about either, except that the pillock from Coldplay is on one of them.

I always had the impression Jay-Z was on a mission to record the mythic classic rap album, solid from start to finish, the set which would hold its own alongside Illmatic and the rest. He came close more than once but I'm not convinced either The Blueprint or The Black Album ever quite got there, great though they undoubtedly were. Given how The Blueprint III follows a couple of duds and  represents the third recycling of a winning title, I had a feeling it was going to be one of those in the vein of The Dynasty which just sort of sits there between a couple of better records - not actually bad, but not something you'd necessarily bother including on your CV; but now that I've made the effort, I realise I'm wrong, and The Blueprint III may even have been his best - if not in terms of immediacy.

The standout tracks, What We Talkin' About, Empire State of Mind, and Real As It Gets are easily amongst the lad's greatest for my money, perfecting what I suppose we might as well call stadium trap - cinematic whilst somehow invoking Aaron Copland through the thoroughly contemporary orchestration - at least as of 2009 - of vaguely epic squiggles copied and pasted to different bits of a screen; and it probably helps that the rest of the record does its own thing rather than attempt to capitalise on this winning formula. No ID, Timbaland, the Neptunes and others - notably Kanye West before we all got sick of hearing about the fucker - chop up something extrapolated from that New York sound rooted in DJ Premier and the like, soulful with a lot of kick in the lower end but without necessarily covering old ground. Only Swizz Beatz lets the side down, phoning in another one of those things which sounds as though it came from the soundtrack of Jersey Shore and should rightfully be backing a loop of Deena saying something fucking stupid about how much she likes to party; but never mind. Everybody is allowed at least one clunker when the rest is good.

Lyrically speaking, Jay-Z does what he usually does, namely bigging himself up for an hour or so with a reasonable degree of wit. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't, and on this occasion it works really well. Swizz Beatz aside, all the elements here add up to something greater than the sum of their parts, resulting in album of such fresh and breezy composition that it has the feeling of a debut - not bad going for a guy who had just reached the end of his second decade in the biz.

The Beatles (1968)

I've no doubt that whole books have been written about the white album - as I'm not going to call it - but I haven't read any of them, have no plans to read any of them, and I'm not even going to do any internet homework with this one in the hope of coming to it absolutely fresh, as I suspect the lads would have wanted; and because I have a theory that this was the whole point of the album.

The Beatles were the first pop band I noticed when I was a kid, mainly because their music kept turning up on the telly and with such frequency that I began to recognise a few of the songs and asked my mum about them. The Magical Mystery Tour album turned up one Christmas in response, followed by Yellow Submarine, Sgt. Pepper and Rubber Soul all within the next six months. I planned to get the rest but I suspect the strain of saving up my pocket money month after month was getting a bit much; then I discovered punk rock, and eventually began to find everyone still banging on about the fab four two decades after the event a little exhausting. It wasn't that I'd had a change of heart so much as a change of focus, and it had become difficult to listen to the Beatles what with their music still getting heavy airplay on every radio station everywhere in the universe. You can only have so much of a good thing.

Eventually it died down so much that I no longer found myself subjected to Penny Lane on a daily basis, and I began to wonder what those other Beatles records had sounded like, and so I picked up where I'd left off as a sort of favour to my nine-year old self.

Happily, it's quite easy to apply fresh ears to the eponymous 1968 double because, of its thirty tracks, I count only three which have suffered from the same overexposure as Hey Jude and the rest. Dear Prudence I recognise mainly from the Banshees cover, and there are bits and pieces I recall as having been sampled on Jay-Z's Grey Album, but otherwise there's a lot here which I've never heard before. In case you missed the inference of that sentence, the significant detail is songs by the Beatles which I've never heard before, which seems pleasantly incredible in the second decade of the twenty-first century. More specifically, for me this means Beatles without baggage, without specific lines or riffs conjuring unwanted images of smirking regional television reporters introducing light-hearted news features about a foolish resident of a hill or a woman named Lucy who has her own jewellery business on the Isle of Skye.

What with the plain white cover and general lack of flash, I get the idea that the Beatles were trying to get away from being the Beatles, or at least from what the Beatles had become in terms of their fame - hence, I guess, the seemingly sarcastic revelations of Glass Onion which must surely have been addressed to those reading far too much into the back catalogue. To invoke what probably wasn't yet a cliché in 1968, it was just about the music, man.

Yet The Beatles is no reductionist return to basics, and is at least as progressive and experimental as the fab and swinging sixties albums which preceded it, arguably more so with the likes of Revolution 9, inspired doubtless by persons such as Pierre Schaeffer and actually much easier on the ear than its legend would suggest. Of course, they do return to basics on tracks such as the frankly still fucking incredible Back in the USSR which seemingly takes the piss out of the Beach Boys - something else I hadn't really noticed until now; but they were doing something with those basics - inventing heavy metal as some have argued, although I'm not convinced by that one - and they were doing it as the reinvestment they wanted to hear without intrusively commercial considerations. I'd say this holds true for most of the album despite that we're still talking about the Beatles rather than Arnold Schoenberg, so it pops but entirely on their terms; and as such comes across as a surprisingly intimate work compared with the more overt populism of the previous efforts. It's almost talking to itself with just one other individual in the room, that being yourself, the listener - which additionally provides, I suppose, some insight as to why Charles Manson believed the Beatles were sending secret messages specifically to him on this record.

It's become fairly easy to lose sight of why anyone ever liked this bunch, and I still refuse to believe that their legend deserves to eclipse any other legend you may care to name; and excepting Ringo, I found the solo material mostly underwhelming, but something about the combination of the four of them was genuinely wonderful and I'm impressed that an album of a full half-century vintage can still yield surprises, and so many.

Master P - Mama's Bad Boy (1992)

I have a facebook friend called Melissa-Jane. She's one of those facebook friends you have as a facebook friend because she's your friend on facebook. She works at some kind of community yoots place in my old hood, and thus occasionally posts slightly demonstrative status updates about hanging out with da mans dem and the most bangingest dubstep producer being a fourteen-year old member of her yoots group. I'm sure she's listened to a fucking shitload of dubstep in her time, so she should know. Her other notable facebook posts have included a few house exchanges, people with names like Toby and Jemima, owners of a cottage in the Lake District very keen to swap for a few weeks if anyone has anything around the Dordogne; and some crowing over Jay-Z speaking out against overuse of the word bitch, because it's sexist to call a lady a bitch and that's bad. He's probably read my blog post, she snorted brayingly, because she had written a blog post about Jay-Z's sexist song 99 Problems. How can he say bitch, she probably asked in the blog post, when he is married to Beyoncé who is a lady and bitch is a word for lady? I say probably because I only remember the general thrust of it, most of which was qualified by Melissa-Jane explaining how she herself only listens to real rap, like that nice J-Live dude. Apparently J-Live has a significantly more respectful attitude to bitches than Jay-Z. I tried pointing out that Jay-Z nicked 99 Problems from Ice-T, but she didn't seem particularly interested; so I unfollowed her because 1) I don't really like excessively middle-class people, particularly not those who bang on about being down with the kids, 2) J-Live is rubbish, 3) no good ever came of knowing someone named Melissa-Jane, and 4) bitches ain't shit but hoes and tricks.

Anyway, to get to the point, if we imagine some sort of metaphysical realness sphere - for want of a better term - the kind of thing Plato might have envisaged had he grown up around Bedford-Stuyvesant, then this Master P album would be at the exact opposite pole of our hypothetical sphere to Melissa-Jane, everything she stands for, all her treasured J-Live twelves, and everyone she's ever known or met. Mama's Bad Boy be some surprisingly ig'nant shit, and that's why it's a classic. It might of course be argued that I'm just some ageing cracker getting his anthropological jollies from things which scare middle-class people, but none of y'all bitches be sayin' that shit to my face, and Mama's Bad Boy is still a great album.

As the millionaire entrepreneur behind No Limit Records, Master P should require no introduction, but Mama's Bad Boy dates from way back when he very much did require an introduction. Musically it's a bit rough around the edges compared to later No Limit productions - your basic north California variation on the g-funk of the day - although the bass is nice and it has a warm studio feel, predating beats written inside a silicon chip and all that; but it works because that stuff still sounds great, a touch jazzy, summery with a nice low boom-bap contrasting hard against the lyrics. Master P has never been the world's greatest lyricist, but he sounded reasonably decent back in 1992, although to be fair there was less competition back then, and as always he makes up for what he lacks with personality - and of course the enduring magic of ig'nant.

It's poverty, shootings, waiting on that bubble up and the usual. Women tend to divide into those conducive to sucking a dick and those from whom one catches a venereal disease; and I'm awarding extra points for the creative retooling of We are the World:

We are the world,
We are the dealers,
We are the ones that sell crack-cocaine,
So let's start selling...

It doesn't even rhyme! That's how much of a fuck Master P doesn't give on this album. We're a long, long way from Arrested Development.

We need the ig'nant shit because sometimes life can be so crap that it's the only thing which makes any sense and which doesn't sound like bullshit; and yes, there's a certain aroma of celebration in some of the judicious beatings and shootings described here, and it's very irresponsible, and I'm sure Melissa-Jane would give Master P a piece of her mind should he wander into a certain yoots club; but if it bothers anyone, there's a heapin' helpin' of context at the end when our man - I'm guessing about eighteen years of age when he dropped this record - shouts out to everyone he knew at school who didn't live to appreciate his success, and it's one hell of a long list. So as with most ig'nant rap, yes it's funny because this is the sound of kids entertaining their friends and making them laugh; and it's funny that the term ig'nant will probably upset those who feel we should know better; and maybe it isn't Shakespeare or Chaucer or Common or Doseone or any of those boring wankers; but unfortunately it is real, at least on its own terms. Mama's Bad Boy is what happens when you cram people into run-down housing between a liquor store and a gun shop, so just be thankful that one good thing came out of it on this occasion.

Parquet Courts - Light Up Gold (2012)

I know nothing of this group other than that some bloke on facebook, specifically the bloke who suggested I might enjoy the Sleaford Mods - and was right, seemed to regard them as a good thing. It sounded decent enough to me, so I bought the CD in order to listen to it on my discman like the caveman I am with my flared trousers and furniture moulded from orange plastic spheres. I still don't care too much for downloads, having had endless problems with the one iPod I own, and generally preferring physical objects, partially because with the effort necessary for the production and distribution of a compact disc or vinyl album, most artists will at least try to make sure the material is of such quality as to justify that effort. At least that's the theory.

Light Up Gold could probably have been recorded at any point between now and 1978 or thereabouts, so I suppose might be deemed to be of a kind with obvious appeal to those who, like myself, prefer the good old days back when everything was better than it is now. This initially sets off my alarm bells being as I'm generally sceptical of nostalgia industries, particularly those which dress like it's still 1972 and pluck at an acoustic guitar in order to sell expensive yoghurts; but whatever Parquet Courts do, whoever they may be and whatever it is they're playing at, they're good enough to short circuit such prejudices.

The cover is one of those casually scribbled jobs designed by Mark E. Smith doodling on the cover of one of his own Fall albums, or thereabouts, and the music is recorded in keeping with this aesthetic - basic, but not so basic as to be making any sort of self-conscious lo-fi statement. It's New York guys kicking up a tuneful din in their garage, but thankfully nothing like the fucking Strokes. I've a feeling Parquet Courts may sound a little like Pavement, except the only Pavement I recall hearing was chopped up and sampled by dj n-wee for The Slack Album, a version of The Black Album by Jay-Z which was, I thought, significantly better than the original. So, lacking qualifications to make comparisons with Pavement, Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers seem the next obvious parallel thanks to that chugging, breezy, enthusiasm, sort of like Velvet Underground without the whining. Then again, wafting a Jilly Goolden hand across the speaker, I'm getting a sort of Rockabilly version of REM before they turned into U2, countrified bits of early Devo, a caffeinated Beck with more sincerity, even The DBs if anyone remembers them, and it would be nice to think that somebody did. Listening closer still, Light Up Gold sounds like none of these things, but rather seems to be its own animal - a fairly accurate evocation of the sheer joy of being in a band, so far as I recall, and yet existing in 2014 without this representing a contradiction. I hate people who say things like a good tune will never go out of style, but Jesus this is a great record.

UGK - Ridin' Dirty (1996)

Many centuries ago, just before I discovered the internet and the joy of buying stuff from it, and a few years into most London record stores getting into the concept of selling mainly just the latest George Michael or Adequate Furry Animals shite - and very little else - I stumbled across a second-hand place in Camberwell, apparently mere days after someone's mum had cleared out his entire rap collection, thus meaning such an influx of golden nuggets as to cause my eyes to quite literally pop out on stalks. There on the racks was just about every rap disc upon I had cogitated over the previous couple of years, all cheap, and probably a good suitcase worth of stuff. Amongst these were four discs by UGK: the notorious Banned EP - boasting what is probably the most astonishingly and amusingly offensive rap number of all time, the sort of thing which makes Eazy-E sound like J-Live rapping about lettuce; and the first three albums, of which this is the third. Somehow, I hadn't heard too much by UGK, but I understood them to be essential listening, and I'd liked what I knew of them from their guesting on tracks by Jay-Z, C-Murder, and others. Anyway, they didn't disappoint.

I'm not sure UGK ever recorded exactly what you would call a classic album, but on the other hand I don't think they ever made a bad one; and Ridin' Dirty feels like some sort of aural landmark, epitomising the third coast sound at its height before the influence of crunk levelled everything out, reducing something previously too big and diverse for categorisation to a bloke with gold teeth telling you about his car. For those of you who've just joined us, southern rap has never really been any one thing, and has as such always sounded - to me at least - a little broader, more adventurous than forms originated elsewhere in the States, the west-coast g-funk, or one of those headachey New York types exorting us all to wave our hands in the air over sixty flavours of Roland cowbell. Like the south itself, southern rap makes its own rules.

Ridin' Dirty is produced by N.O. Joe, a name perhaps more famously associated with Scarface and Rap-A-Lot Records, and as such establishes a clear link between the bluesy-gospel roots of its practitioners - gumbo funk, as the aforementioned N.O. Joe termed it, evoking jazzy film noir soundtracks jammed out at three in the morning in smoky clubs, wah-wah guitar and soft stabs of electric piano over a deep, warm bass, all slowed down to the pace of the Gulf Coast heat. More than anything else I can think of, Ridin' Dirty is roughly what it sounds like living in Texas, hot, dry, slow, and with quite a lot of death around. It's not only a profoundly soulful listening experience, it's also quietly terrifying, as - I suspect - are many of the darker blues records once you get past the patter. UGK were gangsta rap in the truest sense, that being something entirely consistent with Chuck D's view of rap as being the black CNN. It'll probably be a while before the genre throws up anything quite so classy as UGK again, so this is as good a place as any to get yourself edumacated.

Tha Dogg Pound - 2002 (2001)

Has there ever been a record label that blew it in quite such spectacular fashion as Death Row, or which learned so little from its mistakes and continued to blow it over and over? Losing both Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, they spent the next decade boasting about how peachy it was to be rid of such two-faced talentless homosexuals whilst embarking on a series of increasingly desperate attempts to cash-in on what little of the two-faced talentless homosexual back catalogue they had retained - lame greatest hits collections released side by side with compilations sagging with witless crap about Dr. Gay and his NWAids.

Oh wait - gay rhymes with Dre.

I get it now.

Worst of all, as the label wasted time and brain cells on laboured concept albums suggesting that Dr. Dre enjoys man-on-man penisary action with Eminem in the mistaken belief that anyone really cared that much, the Death Row roster otherwise boasted Lady of Rage, Above the Law - one of the greatest rap groups of all time - and Crooked I - probably the best new west-coast MC at least since Xzibit - and did nothing with them. None of these artists were recording albums about the day when Dr. Dre did a poo in his pants in the dinner queue and some of it come out of his pants and he thought it was chocolate pudding and ate a bit of it and smiled and a man saw him do it, so Death Row didn't bother and just kept them around to make the fucking tea or something.

It would be annoying if they, as a label, didn't make such great records - well maybe not great records, but definitely better than they ought to be. Actually, it's still annoying; and ignorant and a waste of everyone's time even leaving aside degrees of homophobia so raging as to make Pat Robertson seem reasonable; on which subject - guys, this whole obsessive fear of gay people thing: It's stupid, it's really kind of weird, and honestly it says more about you than it does about anyone else.

Tha Dogg Pound's 2002 - presumably named in the hope of further annoying Dr. Dre who had just released 2001 - somehow illustrates this. Tha Dogg Pound were never quite the rap group you couldn't live without, but neither were they bereft of qualities, and there's always been something very listenable about Kurupt in particular. This compilation, distinguished by appearances from Jay-Z and Xzibit, both of whom spent some time on Death Row's list of enemies who smelled of poo and wee but were fine if it helped flog a few CDs - was put together after Daz and Kurupt jumped ship, presumably tired of all the money sidelined for their own material being spent on proving that Dr. Dre once saw a man's willy and said he liked it and a man heard him saying that he liked it. So 2002 is offcuts and remixes, an afterthought released by a label who'd just blown it yet again; and in spite of everything, it's still a pretty great album - nothing that's going to change the universe, although It'z All About That Money comes close enough, but it's a fat, nourishing sound, a good square meal. If Death Row could have put out just one album without pissing off the artist responsible, or wasting time banging on about people who'd had the good sense to take their talent elsewhere, that would have been a truly great record, but I guess the time is past.

DangerDoom - The Mouse and the Mask (2005)

Piffle is probably the word I was looking for.

I never quite got the appeal of Dangermouse - meaning the producer rather than the 1980s cartoon rodent of espionage. Bolting Jay-Z's Black Album onto a load of old Beatles samples to create The Grey Album was a pretty nice move, but nowhere near so weirdly compelling as the guy who did the same thing with samples of the group Pavement to create The Slack Album, yielding a version of Justify My Thug that would have been the greatest thing Jay-Z ever recorded, had he actually recorded it. Dangermouse of course did that thing with wossisface from Goodie Mob, and apparently had some sort of involvement with Gorillaz, which I'd hardly offer as a recommendation. He's far from the worst producer ever to twiddle a knob or to lift trumpet solos from a Tom Jones record, but nothing stands out. To my ears, everything he does resembles a supermarket's own brand version of the 1960s movie soundtrack beats that folks like Skitz or those Herbaliser lads did a lot better. That kid at school, the friend of a friend who raps and is actually pretty good - the first tape he ever gets together will have beats by some spotty mate who sounds roughly like Dangermouse. I mean it's not terrible by any means, but...

Having only really heard MF Doom as a guest on other people's tracks, I had reasonably high expectations. He's got a good voice, and he can spin a canny line for sure, but for some reason nothing here really leapt up from the CD and forced me to pay attention, although maybe it will grow with repeat listening as he's clearly a talent.

The Mouse and the Mask is, lest I have incorrectly assumed you know what I'm talking about, a collaboration amounting to some decent lyrical work from MF Doom reduced to forty or so minutes of texture by a producer who just doesn't do it for me. This in itself wouldn't be so annoying but for there being some sort of deal with the Adult Swim channel, and so characters from Aqua Teen Hunger Force show up between tracks, and even become subject matter in a few cases. I can't tell if this is some promotional thing, or whether the chaps just love Aqua Teen Hunger Force so much that they just had to do this album in this way, but it's kind of annoying. Aqua Teen Hunger Force is one of those purportedly adult animations which makes an ironic virtue of its own low production values and unfunny jokes about cancer, rape and other side-splitters - at least I think it does: I managed about fifteen minutes of one episode before I got bored, and it was pretty much South Park on elephant tranquilisers from what I could tell. I could be completely wrong, but then I don't actually care enough to worry about it.

So here we have a CD of generally disappointing tracks interspersed with the voice of an anthropomorphic cartoon milkshake desperately trying to get on the Dangermouse album, the hilarious joke being that Master Shake isn't a very good rapper and is thus doomed to fail - tee hee - and that The Mouse and the Mask wouldn't be quite so amazing were Master Shake to spoil it by - ho ho ho - spitting the maniac lyrical all over trunk banging Dangermouse beats of hella fresh def flyness and the like.

Oh my sides.