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Album Leakage 2006: Christmas Comes Early Like our bol D.H. Lawrence wrote: "When Douglas Passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot." Hastily written reviews from Young Douglas Passion:
If Jay has had a career-long Achilles’ heel, it’s that Sean Carter The Executive always held sway over Jay-Z The Artist. He’s done his damnest to make the characters as interchangeable as the average Park Slope lesbian–and in his hustler persona they are—but the same shrewdness as a businessman that boosted him into the velveteen throne of an empire that overlooks Def Jam, Budweiser and a host of other legally bland ventures hasn’t come without sacrifice. Artistically, Hov insists on hedging his bets. As he has boasted so frequently, “I will not lose.” And so, when Jay The Artist declared that the Black Album would abandon promotion, videos and airplay, Sean Carter The Executive chuckled patronizingly and cheffed up elaborate promotion, a bunch of videos and a pair of predictable-if-effective singles from the Neptunes and Timbaland. Maybe, with Reasonable Doubt forever assured a spot in the pantheon of classics, he came to view albums not as holistic entities, but simply as collections of undifferentiated cells suitable for giving rise to whatever he deems necessary for the marketplace: club song, girl song, sentimental song, street song. As the greatest rapper of all time in the opinion of anyone who matters, you can’t knock the hustle. Still, it’s tantalizing to think of the albums that Jay hasn’t made. Of all his LPs, Kingdom Come might be the closest to the triumph of emo Hov over his ever-calculating Financial Times-reading conscience. It’s a flawed effort—the production is inconsistent, the hooks are lackluster and he uses way too much of that breathy hiding-from-monsters-in-the-corner whisper voice—but it’s also the album that everyone claimed they wanted to him to make: most of the songs are topical, he hurls his oft-criticized taste for quoting other rappers’ lines and he barely mentions the yayo-peddling that remained an bottomless reservoir for almost a decade’s worth of albums. But we’re not in the business of giving out brownie points for effort, and Jay doesn’t need them. Any doubters (the internet has seethed with roiling hated for the album since its premature leak) need only listen to “Do You Wanna Ride?” or “Trouble” to understand that Jay hasn’t lost a step. That might be the most impressive thing of all – even at 38 years of age, the guy is still the nastiest rapper doing it. After pushing the meme of being the “Michael Jordan of recording” with such determination, Jay’s return from retirement might ironically be judged with the same negativity that now clouds His Airness’s final revisiting of the hardwood. Does that mean Rick Ross is Kwame Brown, Nas is Jerry Stackhouse and Redman is Jahidi White?
As the favorite group of every Hip-Hop internet nerd at least cool enough to know that dudes who cleverly rap about selling cocaine are more intriguing than guys who cleverly rap about rapping, the Clipse’ main adversary has been not the fans or the media, but the unfair crackers at Jive. Fueling the anticipation for Hell Hath No Fury was the magnificent We Got It 4 Cheap Vol. 2, a mixtape that merged top-shelf instrumentals (pillaged from rappers who weren’t using them right) with snarling and nihilistic verses about pitching nose-candy Willy Wonka. It was one of those rare moments of artistic planetary alignment that mixtapes seem so conducive to tethering (see: Joe Budden’s Mood Muzik II, Lil Weezy’s SQ4). There’s obviously something about a bunch of motherfuckers in the studio making songs over beats they love and rapping for the sake of riddling that lends itself to a special purity. And that was the Clipse’ moment in the sun. Yes, Hell Hath No Fury is very good. But while the Virginia Beach hermanos still hock phlegm on their own terms and with minimal concessions to such trivialities as making mass-marketable music, their second album doesn’t completely capture the same brutal spirit that made the mixtape such a cult classic.
People kept telling Passion The Don that Snoop was spitting on his new album. Snoop Doggy Dog? The relentlessly redundant rapper who spent the last decade as a silky-voiced Speak-N-Spell stuck on S-N-Double-O-P, L-B-C and C-R-I-P? The Dogfather? Snoop upside your head? That dude? Shit, even in his salad days, the skeletal O.G. Broadus was never much of a wordsmith, so expecting Snoop to channel vintage Rakim was like hoping a wombat would play Mendelssohn’s E Minor fugue op.35 no.1 on a ukulele while wearing hot-orange Crocs. But it’s all true, except for the part about the Crocs and the wombat.
Young Jeezy is as good as anyone in the rap business at filling up the space between hooks. His verses are all the same—collections of Bob Saget-esque punchlines about paper, work and, oddly enough, breakfast delicacies (Frosted Flakes, Lucky Charms, Krispee Kremes)—but there’s never a drop off in energy, intensity or pacing from the recently departed chorus. It’s a talent, and one worth enjoying, especially when it’s over epic prison riot beats like these.
Nasty Eminem is back! Except he’s still doing his own production, he’s still mad about something or other, and he’s still using that grating mad-at-being-grounded voice. Read more articles in Arts » |
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