Just wanted to briefly call your attention to this No Limit classic, which I enjoyed playing repeatedly during my contracts exam this Friday. I've always found the whole "if you're not a soldier, then what's your purpose in life" concept that runs through the No Limit Soldiers tracks strangely attractive. Obviously there are lots of meaningful non-No Limit Soldier lives, but I guess I'm attracted to the view that there's some single type of valuable life to be led out there (like being a genius attorney), and that all others are pointless at best. I could ramble for a while about the similar types of essentialism at work in Westerns and 90s gangsta rap (although the best Westerns deconstruct/interrogate the masculine ideal, see for example The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, but then, perhaps you could argue that the best gangsta rap - Mobb Deep for example with their preoccupation with the 'foul'-ness of their deeds - deconstructed its ideologies?), but anyway, I love No Limit, it's dumb but it's good dumb. Silkk, for once, has the best verse on his own song. Actually, you could make a case for Mystikal, but Mystikal on No Limit posse tracks always annoys me, he detracts from the so amateurish it's genius vibe. Not sure why I like Silkk's "I'm a psycho" put-on so much, but I do and it always cracks me up when he goes:
So don't flip me, cuz you'll end up empty
and then I'll reload
and reloadandreloadand reloadandreload
whole barrel explode!!!!
Also when he explains that 'yeah, I'm Silkk The Shocker, and yeah, that's me.' Most of all when he says, "mention meeeeee to my enemieeeeees, they thinking of PAIN" and sounds like an adorable hyperactive five-year-old doing a Tupac imitation on Youtube. In fact, describing TRU as a band of three little kids, each doing his own very different and usually very bad Tupac imitation, would not be too far off the mark. Though such a description does grave injustice to C-Murder.
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I got tricked into buying this after slightly enjoying the cartoonish gangsta aesthetic on 'Ghetto D.' But Silkk is truly the useless member of TRU. He tries to cram in a ton of syllables, like E40, and fails; tries to replicate everything from 2Pac to bossman Master P, and it doesn't work. About the only tracks I can listen to off this are "Tell Me," "What Gangstas Do" and, of course, "It Ain't My Fault."
Isn't it weird that amateur-ish regional riffs on 2pac's whole persona are far more entertaining and life affirming than the real thing?
Ehhh, I don't know if I'd say THAT, exactly. 'All Eyez on Me' is probably the only legit classic of the "I'm-Releasing-a-DOUBLE-Album-Bitches" mid-90s subgenre, and he's got plenty of other material worthy of inclusion in the classic category.
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