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Album Review: Gangster & A Gentleman

Styles' debut is a pleasant surprise.

by Douglas Passion | 2002.10.19

A few years back, Styles was the member of the Lox you always forgot. Jada was the charismatic one, Sheek was the taller animated dude and then there was the other guy, the short mumble-mouthed kid. Few would have predicted that Styles' Gangster & A Gentleman album would be superior to the other full-length LPs released by the members of the Lox (including their group efforts).

If you've kept your ear to the street for the last year or so, the quality of Styles' album is of little surprise. After a series of mixtape verses and guest appearances in which he laced tracks with nothing but pure thuggery, the Ghost developed a reputation as one of the grimier rappers in the game. On Gangster & A Gentleman , Styles not only provides the violent threats we've become accustomed to, but also demonstrates more introspection and creatively than could have been expected from the man who "appears in your house, clearing it out, Holiday style."

Although about ninety-nine percent of the album deals with ghetto life, Styles has enough imagination to keep the topics from getting completely redundant. Of course he has the hood album prerequisites such as the song about the loyal girlfriend and the track devoted to the fallen family member, but he also has his moments of inventiveness. "We Thugs (My Niggas)", a three-way tag team featuring the Lox triumvirate, and "Nobody Believes Me", a track where Styles converses with his knife, gun and weed, show skillful writing and song composition beyond the typical thug ranting.

Don't get it fucked up though, Styles is still more than willing to play the superthug role. "Next time I go to jail," he raps on the Casio-heavy "Y'all Know We In Here", "I ain't getting the bail/ I'm a kill a hundred niggas, right in front of niggas/ if cops come through, they getting it too."

To his credit, most of Styles' threats are less homicidal than the prior example. He isn't the most charismatic emcee, but he falls into the same category as Cormega - dudes who sound genuine when they threaten your life. When Styles P says, "All I really wanted was a gun and a blunt/ a little money and the keys to a Taurus," you believe it.

Although he shows minimal versatility in flipping up his conventional monotone, his delivery is effective in conveying emotion over both hard-edged tracks as well as the more mellow selections. For every song like "I'm a Ruffryder", where he says "I'm a little more than itchy/ motherfucker, when it's time to splatter your mass or burst your kidney," he also provides a joint like "Listen", where he contemplates "ask myself where the next Malcolm X at…is he upstate like an ape in a box?"

The production on Gangster & A Gentleman is certainly better than most recent Ruff Ryder efforts, but it still occasionally succumbs to the Swizz club sound that played out three years ago. Let sped-up drums, rapid-fire bass hits and cheesy synths go, fellas. Several beats show a nice merging of soul sampling and 21st century keyboard twiddling, but Styles comes off best over the more organic sounding tracks.

Luckily, the Ruff Ryder creed of avoiding samples has obviously been shredded along with all those missing Enron documents. "Soul Clap" is a chopped-up section of Tribe's classic "Scenario Remix" and "Listen" is a tweaked Al Green loop.For those of you who enjoy non-musical Triton-mashing, there are several songs that will feed your fix before such beats completely go the way of New Jack Swing.

If you're looking for neo-soul earthiness, go elsewhere. But if a solid street album is something that sparks your interest, Gangster & A Gentleman is a welcome addition to your collection.

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