You (DMX Voice) Can't Be Serious

From this Sunday's NY Times Magazine article on white neo-neo-soul singers:

Like Hawthorne, Reed was a white middle-class Jewish kid (real name: Eli Husock). He started out listening to country and early rock ’n’ roll; most of the music played at his bar mitzvah was gangsta rap like N.W.A. and Gravediggaz.

You have to admire the writer stupid/ignorant enough to believe this guy's story. What N.W.A. songs did he play at his Bar Mitzvah? 'Something 2 Dance 2'? Maybe 'Express Yourself,' with its righteous say-no-to-drugs message? 'Days of Wayback' would work well in a DJ set with Joni Mitchell's 'Circle Game.' And what about Gravediggaz? 'Diary of a Madman,' perhaps? I bet the intro got all the Jewish grandmothers up from their seats:

[Lady] They killed my baby... oh god they killed my baby
[Judge] Order in the court
[Lady] I will make you pay for this you murderers
[Judge] I said order in the court now! Now, before this
        court passes judgment, will the four defendants
         please rise and approach the bench
[Lawyer] Trust me guys, it's all under control
             the judge is my uncle, he'll take the
             insanity plea...oh yeah, don't forget
             my retainer balance
[Judge] Okay, I understand you guys are pleading insanity
        claiming demonic spirits possessed you to do
        these hideous murders.  Can you please explain
        to the court how these so called spirits made
        you into these RAVING MADMEN?!?!

Actually that's pretty funny and light-spirited. 

Today I Feel Badly For Kanye

As you know, I do not get down with Kanye at all, and I have no interest in listening to/talking about his soon-to-be massively overrated album, other than that starting it off with some thoroughly mediocre rapping over a reasonable facsimile of a mid-90s RZA beat naturally raises questions in my mind as to whether Kanye is even as good a rapper as U-God. I think so, but I had to think about it for a little while. Anyway, as you've all surely heard, Bush recently announced that Kanye accusing him of not caring about black people was the worst or most disgusting moment of his presidency. To which many people have replied that Katrina itself or September 11th or bungling Iraq ought to be the worst moment of his presidency. Now that's silly; all that Bush meant was that was the most personally wounding moment of his presidency, not the worst thing, objectively speaking, that happened during it. So Bush was hurt and that's understandable, as he's not a racist, just a horrible mismanager. But who would've thought that Bush's personal pique at Kanye would lead to Kanye being arm-twisted into recanting his equally understandable views on national television? Not I. Worse yet, after eliciting this blanket apology from Kanye, who was clearly trying to say that maybe Bush wasn't personally a racist but the response to Katrina was still all about race, Lauer goes on to conflate Kanye's accusation of Bush's racism in negligently allowing however many hundreds of African-Americans to die with Kanye's alleged racism in telling Taylor Swift that she was less deserving of an MTV music video award than Beyonce. So the ridiculous upshot of the interview ends up being that Kanye needs absolution from Matt Lauer for accusing Bush of being a racist for seeming, to all the world, completely disinterested in the fate of black people in New Orleans, and Kanye is also a racist for suggesting that a white performer's video was worse than a black performer's video (when it was!), and it would be really great if Kanye could apologize for these appalling acts of bigotry. Then after Kanye has his predictable Twitter breakdown over the interview, Lauer says that there's nothing untoward about rubbing the video of the MTV incident in Kanye's face, while his white coanchor, clearly disgusted with Kanye, sniffily concurs that there was nothing the matter with Lauer's interviewing tactics at all. I mean, not only is showing the poor shitshow footage of his most embarrassing public breakdown less worthy of journalism than one of those sick postgame reunion shows they do in reality TV land, the whole concept of the interview was blatantly racist. That concept, nothing more and nothing less, is that Kanye can be welcomed back into the fold of white civilization as a good, safe black person once he (a) recants any "line-crossing" charges of white racism, and (b) admits that his being rude to a white girl and implying that she won an award because of race was, in fact, racist. That's kind of Orwellian if you stop and think about it. Next thing you know, we'll have people asking Kanye to apologize for his "racist" interest in sleeping with white women, or perhaps his "racist" appropriation of bad 80s rock and shitty French house (stealing the white man's music!). Maybe from now on Kanye's only allowed to do Motown-sampling tunes that bash black consumerism and deadbeat dads. The rest of his career can be 'All Falls Down' re-recorded umpteen times.

wakaflockawakaflockawakaflockaflockaflocka

So I was sitting in court today right in front of my life-appointed judge and between falling asleep 5 times, unconsciously I randomly started mouthing the lyrics to Waka Flocka Flame's "Hard In Da Paint." Fortunately she can't read lips. Would've been awkward. Anyway, I have some brief thoughts on music. Like, really brief thoughts.

'Airplanes' is very unfortunate. We truly seem to be headed for an era of emo-rap. The hook epitomizes everything I hate about Music By White People With Guitars. I don't know if there's something objectively gross about that type of "I could really use a wish right NOWWWWWWWW" type of angst or if I just can't relate. I incline towards the former. I mean, it's not like I'm a tough guy, I drive around constantly singing along with the Supremes and shit, but there's a difference between genuine misery and feeling like you want to cut yourself with tiny blades and wear really dark eye shadow. But the rapping's even worse. I mean, the guy's possibly the hugest sellout in the recent history of the genre and he spends his last verse bemoaning label politics - the same, you know, politics that are foisting this awful song on us. He makes Ke$ha feel uncalculated and authentic. Not to mention the shit with the planes and shooting stars. Look, wishing on a shooting star is already bullshit, therefore, you can wish on anything you want to. A fart if you like. Don't act like there's this wish-code that requires you to entreaty the fucking heavens to turn planes into shooting stars so you can have something to stick your little emo wishes to. Like I really thought that we abandoned insanely trite conceits in pop lyricism like that one back in the days of Sinatra.

Forever Young is interestingly bad in theory but not in actuality. In theory because (a) you've got this man rapping/talking/murmuring like he's dying, yet he's babbling about how eternally young he is, (b) the third verse where his flow totally breaks down and he just keeps saying "hold up, hold up", (c) redundantly explaining that "if you love me this is how you let me know/don't ever let me go/that's how you let me know," which is the sort of thing that could've come off as all cool and dadaist, as the lazy critics used to say, in the mouth of the 2004 J.R. Writer, but from Jay sounds more like, "oh my god, let's get this man some help, he's coming down with Alzheimer's", and (d) when he asks if we got the picture yet, because he's painting us a portrait of himself, even though he has done no such thing at any point in the song, so his insistence that there's this picture that we're not getting just seems really delusional. But in actuality it's just a bad song, not spellbindingly awful rapping or anything.

Usher, OMG(osh??). This is a song that I would be sort of cool with, sans will.i.am. verse, if Usher weren't the one singing it. But Usher is actually a real singer, not, like, fucking La Bouche. Or The Dream. His job isn't humming a few bars of crap over an electro beat and calling it a day. So he turns out to be really bad at humming a few bars of crap over an electro beat and calling it a day. Who knew that was a skill? In any event, there's absolutely no sense of desire or sex here. And the whole thing ends up sounding like one of those awkward attempts some of the more conservative 60s bands would make to do something psychedelic post-Sergeant Pepper. All those, "here, we've got a weird spacy synthesizer, we're hippies now" songs. Can you actually imagine Usher performing this thing? What would he do during all the dead space? Everytime I hear the song I imagine Usher on some 1968 episode of the Ed Sullivan show, in some crazy multi-colored getup, awkwardly staring at will.i.am, his keyboardist, being all like, "see, I can do house-influenced pop too."

Ne-Yo, Champagne Life. Have you heard this? Hilarious. I guess he had to move past Miss Independent sooner or later. It seems that his new artistic direction is imitation-crappy-1995-r&b. At one point he promises female listeners "nice meal and a good wine, definition of a good time." Definition of a good time? I hate it when singers explain that so and so is the "definition of a dimepiece," when rappers explain that they're the definition of a g, etc., but this really takes the take. What kind of good time is it going to be? The DEFINITION of a good time. Well that's descriptive. A good time kind of a good time.

Ludacris, Sex Room. This might actually be Luda's first good single since, um.... well before #1 Spot. His party shit has just become boring as fuck, his flow as predictable as a Law and Order episode, but he can still rap about sex alright. I especially love the beat, which reminds me a lot of Master P's lost track (the sample clearance monsters ate it) 'Smokin Green' (which by the way is a top ten weed-smoking rap song of all time - I should know because I've never smoked anything in my life and generally can't stand people who do, so for a weed song to speak to me it has to be really good since I can't relate at all). And then the hook reminds me a lot of C-Murder's 'Torcher Chamber.'

I was obsessively listening to Lil B for a week but I've come to feel that he has a long way to go. The Lil B concept is great, sometimes it all comes together, but he can be shockingly reliant on Drake-like punchlines that I don't think any of his fans would be able to tolerate if they weren't coming from Lil B. And then a lot of his shit just doesn't come off. Like most of I'm Thraxx.

Rick Ross f. Styles P, that song where he goes, I think I'm Big Meech, Larry Hoover. Ricky really seems to be coming along as a rapper. And unlike Jeezy, when he does rap well, I don't think he sacrifices much entertainment value. Whereas with Jeezy there was a huge trade of charisma and ad-libs for a little technical competence. (Then again, maybe Jeezy is reaching a bit of an equilibrium. I need to listen to his new mixtape more carefully.) Anyway, Ricky and Styles P are a terrible pairing, Ricky being more from the blockbuster action movie school of rap and Styles being just the grimiest and grittiest rapper out. But it's always nice to hear Styles on the radio. Even when he says things like "the money's like a chair, I'm sitting on it," he says it in such a way, particularly the word 'chair,' that not only does it sound like a good line, it sounds really hard.

I'll comment more on music tomorrow perhaps, but I just wanted to call attention to this comment from Camille Paglia, famed scholar of nothing in particular, in the New York Times. Paglia says the white middle class has lost its sex drive, and offers this as proof:

"A class issue in sexual energy may be suggested by the apparent striking popularity of Victoria’s Secret and its racy lingerie among multiracial lower-middle-class and working-class patrons, even in suburban shopping malls, which otherwise trend toward the white middle class."

How did this make it past the editor? First of all, even the richest malls I go to have a ton of "multiracial" patrons. Once you're past the malls that are 80% Louis Vuitton stores, my mall experience is that mall customers are half multiracial. Maybe that's just Philadelphia; all our malls are stops on bus routes. But I just find it incredible that a New York Times op-ed suggests that to the extent black people come to malls, it's just for the Victoria's Secret. Second, I would next point out that (a) gazillions of white women wear Victoria's Secret, (b) gazillions of white women wear those obnoxious Victoria's Secret Pink sweatpants, sweatshirts, sweateverything, (c) basically all their models are white or Brazilian so how the fuck is Victoria's Secret this indicator of minority sexual energy? Obviously if they were this minority niche brand they'd market themselves more like it. Third and lastly, outside of a sexually repressive culture, which it's clear we don't live in outside of our insane overreactions to the misbehavior of black golfers, is it really even possible for a whole race to suffer from, to quote the piece, "sexual apathy"? I tend to think that people, like dogs, are born with about the same desires and levels of desire through the centuries and millennia and that something like, to cite one of the supposed causes of this pseudo-phenomenon, "the lack of genuine eroticism" in much of our pop music isn't going to have any effect on that.

Fresh Out The Federal, Cases I Got Several

So I got a job this summer working for a judge whom shall go unnamed on a certain Court of Appeals that shall also go unnamed. For my British readers, and uninformed American readers, the thirteen Courts of Appeal, or Circuit Courts, are second in stature only to the Supreme Court. That is, only the Supreme Court can overturn our decisions, whereas we can overturn everybody else's. In the vast, vast majority of cases, the Courts of Appeal have the last say. Although I am just an unpaid intern and a first-year law school student, my work is quite serious; I am assigned a case, given the parties' briefs, the record (which is sometimes thousands of pages long), and am asked to write a memo recommending how the Judge decides. Who knows, as of yet (I've just started), how seriously these recommendations are taken, or how much of my analysis the Judge will find persuasive, but I have already seen cases where the initial bench memo, as they're called, with a few edits, is turned into the opinion of the court. Of course, I can't say anything about the cases on which I'm working, other than to note that, though one might think that the work of a Court of Appeal is quite momentous (and in fact, tomorrow we are hearing a couple of important free speech cases, so some interesting things get done here), for the most part our caseload is composed of appeals from denials of disability benefits, appeals from sentences of imprisonment, and appeals from decisions of the Immigration Board. All of which, legally at least, is quite run-of-the-mill stuff. What I thought my readers might find interesting is that, as I work on my cases, some of which, I think I'm allowed to say, involve conflicting testimony between police officers and young black felons, people getting caught with guns in dangerous housing projects, stop-and-frisks, arguments about the fairness of sentences, I find myself, a little surprisingly, tending to feel a bias towards the criminals and against the government. And not knowing what else to attribute it to - it certainly has nothing to do with my experiences, or my politics - I'm starting to think it's because of rap. I happened on an old copy of It's All On You Vol. 2 last week, and I've been listening to it every day on the way to work. It's not the greatest album, Mannie being caught somewhere between his earlier bounce sound and his cheap keyboard 400 Degreez sound, and as a result relying, rather uncharacteristically, on a lot of boring little samples, and the repetitive hooks on every song are a major detriment, and it's hard to point to a song on it that B.G. just kills (Juvie has some amazing guest spots, though, and Wayne has some amusing prepubescent ones), but overall it's quite solid. In some ways it's a lot like a Cash Money version of Lifestylez Ov da Poor & Dangerous. Anyway, being that I'm currently listening every morning to this menacing 17-year-old-kid cackle in his syrupy voice about killing fellow residents of ultra-low-income-housing with his ever-ready chopper, it's kind of hard, when I get into work, to not feel a little sympathetic for the guy who goes to jail for a few years because he got caught with a gun and had a prior conviction. In my experience there aren't a ton of lawyers, even my age, who are seriously listening to rap, and the more apolitical it gets the less it will even matter, but one does wonder what effect a generation that grew up on 50 Cent and Jay and OutKast will have on the law.

In Which I Tell You All What To Think About Elena Kagan

So Obama has picked another Supreme Court Justice. Some facts on Kagan, if you haven't read the profiles. Kagan was Dean of Harvard Law and, for the past year, the nation's Solicitor General (our chief lawyer, the one who argues the government's really big cases before the Supreme Court). Reportedly she was a terrific Dean. Contrary, however, to what that post might lead you to believe, she wasn't a huge heavy hitter as a scholar. She's written only six articles (and no books); one of these is cited all the time and very well-regarded, while a couple of the others are pretty well-cited but not as big a deal in their field. None of them really speak that conclusively to what Kagan thinks about anything. They're descriptive, not normative, pieces. As Solicitor General, she's lost her one really huge case (Citizens United, the campaign finance case), but she couldn't really help that. Before the Court she's more than held her own in colloquy with the Justices and has generally confirmed her reputation as a brilliant and amiable lawyer. Basically she's (a) held two, if not the two, of the most prestigious jobs in law, while (b) not necessarily doing a whole lot to get those jobs or revealing anything about what she thinks about anything while doing those jobs, and (c), despite her thin record is undoubtedly one of the sharpest minds in the business.

So as to what I think of the appointment. Obama's idea in appointing Kagan, from what we can gather from the reporting on the pick, is as follows. Obama seems to genuinely fear that the Court may invalidate some of his policies, including healthcare reform, even though I really can't fathom Justice Kennedy (the Court's Hamletesque swing voter) or even Chief Justice Roberts going that far. Obama can fathom it though, apparently, and since he hasn't been given an opportunity to replace any of the Court's conservative members, all Obama can do about it is appoint people person types who might succeed in talking the swing voter(s) to vote his way. And since Kagan is such a charming woman, someone who managed to pacify a Harvard faculty that, at the time of her arrival, was reportedly something of a "snake pit," he picked her. That's the idea. Now in the first place, to me this seems like a preventive measure against a disaster that's never going to happen anyway. In the second, there's no evidence to suggest that surrounding Justice Kennedy with chummy liberal characters affects how he votes in the slightest. Outgoing Justice Stevens was a chummy guy, Justice Breyer is a chummy guy, Justice Ginsburg is so warm and chummy that she goes to the opera with Scalia and gives his grandchildren Chanukah gifts. (Seriously.) Nevertheless, Kennedy continues to be about the same judge he was prior to the arrival of these chummy types on the scene, about 16 years ago; if anything he's getting a little more conservative. I just find it a little absurd to think that, in a 9-member Court, in a setting where Justices are probably at least as influenced by the cadre of brilliant Harvard/Yale grads they hire to write their opinions for them as they are by their colleagues, one single person, and the Court's most junior member at that, is going to have some substantive effect on how Kennedy votes.

So what will Kagan bring to the Court besides her nugatory Svengali-like powers? I'm not sure that she brings a whole lot. Certainly, she'll replace one brilliant liberal-leaning legal mind with another brilliant liberal-leaning legal mind. Unlike Sotomayor, whose opinions were generally unremarkable and whose few articles and speeches were somewhat confused and pathetic, Kagan's clearly something of a legal genius. However, from the very little one can glean from what she's written, she doesn't appear to either be a particularly strong liberal or a visionary thinker. That, to me, is a problem, even though I am a conservative and would like to see a conservative Court. For people who are liberals, it ought to be a bigger problem. For the following reasons.

The state of the Court, as I see it, is something like this. For a little over 20 years now, Scalia and an evolving cast of conservative characters have, with a fair amount of success, attempted to impose their vision of constitutional interpretation and policy onto constitutional law. Whatever you think of this vision, it is a vision. Essentially, the Constitution is to be interpreted as it was understood at the time it was written (except when that's inconvenient or would produce terribly untoward results, at which point Scalia and Co. fall back on the policy rationales animating this whole project), which is nice for conservatives as the authors of the Constitution or its various amendments were a great deal more conservative and old-fashioned than we. When you ask Scalia, "why should we be bound by the intent of these old dead men who couldn't possibly foresee contemporary society," he and his conservative colleagues reply, "how else would you like to interpret the Constitution? Twist its vague language to mean something it wasn't supposed to mean? Interpret words like 'equality' in terms of what they mean today, where "what they mean today" will inevitably become, in the hands of a judge not bound by original meaning/intent, whatever that judge wants equality to mean today? Obviously no judge can tell what 'equality' objectively means today, as if it even meant one thing to all Americans; all he can do, once he gives up trying to tell what it meant to the authors of the text, is inject his preferred meaning. Or do you have another idea?"

The liberals on the Court, and arguably the liberals in the law schools, don't have great answers to these questions. They have no overarching vision of constitutional interpretation. Justice Breyer wrote a book about his theory, and pretty much everyone who reviewed it deemed it a huge failure. Essentially, he's a confused pragmatist; half the time when reading Breyer one doesn't know if one's reading law or a cost-benefit analysis. The general idea seems to be that Justice Breyer will read the Constitution in accord with what is good for us, where "what is good for us" is determined by lots of selectively deployed statistics and math. The others, brilliant though they are, have even less of a theory; they generally respond to whatever the latest crazy conservative innovation on the Court is with, "this is crazy and new and inconsistent with the precedents of previous, more liberal Courts, and it just sucks." And it may well suck in every case for narrow specific reasons, but without a deeper theoretical reason for why it sucks and why they're right about campaign finance or abortion or affirmative action, they're doomed, in the long run, to lose the argument. At some point, Justice Stevens essentially surrendered in the fight over interpretive methodology and attempted to out-originalist the originalists, as his dissents turned into counter-histories of what the framers really meant, .i.e. corporate speech isn't protected by the First Amendment because Thomas Jefferson hated big business (I imagine he also would've hated Nazis had they been around at the time, but this wouldn't create a Nazi exception to the First Amendment), the Second Amendment doesn't protect the right of people in D.C. to pack because it was really all about militias. This may have won him brownie points from... well I don't know who, but in the long run agreeing that analyzing Thomas Jefferson's feelings about crap is the way to read the Constitution is liberal suicide. Unfortunately, the liberal members of the Court have no other method to offer. Every time a really big case comes along and the conservatives reach some new shocking result, the liberals say that either (a) "Thomas Jefferson, despite what you say, is NOT on your side," or (b) "come on guys, this is totally contrary to all these decisions that came down in the... 60s, back when the Court was the total opposite of what it is today, but hey, those are still Supreme Court cases and you can't overturn them without damn good reason, and naturally, we being liberals don't think that your conservative reasons are good reasons. Of course, if the old cases in question were contrary to our own beliefs, we'd overturn them, but that, that there would be different. Somehow. We're not sure why."

Thanks to this sort of dithering, we have reached a point where, for example, your constitutional right to confront witnesses against you is today interpreted by reference to what the law in England was in 1787, which is to say, how the law was reported in Shakespearean English in cases we have poor records of from the 1600s. Then when some guy murders his wife and the prosecution tries to bring in her statement that he was a wife-beater into court (Giles v. California), the Court hits the 17th century law books and argues over the appropriate way to interpret the famous case from 1666 where Lord Morley got witnesses kidnapped while he was still in jail, both sides at least pretending that this is a normal way to go about interpreting the Sixth Amendment. This is an absurd state of affairs (both that this is the method and that no one contests it), and nominating a cautious moderate like Kagan isn't going to change things a bit. What you need is someone like Pamela Karlan, a Stanford professor who reportedly made his shortlist and actually has written umpteen articles and books about how to interpret the Constitution in a progressive way. I violently disagree with everything she's ever written, but she'd immediately become one of the three or four most important voices on the Court; she's that good. Unfortunately, Obama will never expend the political capital it would take to nominate someone who's on record as having some kind of coherent nonoriginalist approach to interpreting the Constitution, so we get nominees like Kagan and Sotomayor, carefully chosen for their lack of controversiality. The trouble is that, the Republican Party being the band of obnoxious, ignorant, willfully dishonest boors we are, any nominee who would actually have an impact would be controversial. As in so many other areas of his administration, Obama's too afraid of a little Republican opposition to get anything real done.

Hoes On My Dick Cuz I Look Like Jesus

A lot of yall have probably been wondering where Lil B is going with this whole "I look like Jesus" thing. (Yeah, I don't see the resemblance either.) Before I explain, let me just say that:

Man, I'm God, I look like Jesus, and I'm coming with that fucking heater. Bitch, suck my dick

has to be the greatest ad-lib intro into a rap song in years. Anyway, when I saw this song I thought to myself, "oh my God, Lil B is clearly, like, me if I were a black teen rapper." You see, I occasionally suffer from delusions of grandeur, mostly because I'm kind of ridiculously brilliant (though you sure as fuck wouldn't know it from this blog), and have a habit of referring to myself as God or Jesus. Only around a few people, of course, as it's not really the sort of thing you want to do in public unless you're a recording artist or some other sort of professional attention whore. Of course it's basically a self-parodying joke as I don't actually believe in/care for God or Jesus, but still. Occasionally it even becomes this obsessive sort of fixation, especially after I've done something especially brilliant, and all I can think about for days is how clever and Christ-like I am. Oddly, obsessive grandiosity, physiologically speaking, feels just like a headache. Like when I get this way my head actually aches. Kind of like when John Travolta would think his autistic thoughts in Phenomenon. (Except those were the product of a magic genius-producing brain tumor. I don't believe tumors actually work that way.) Anyway, I kind of figure that Lil B is sort of on the same tip.

What's funny about Lil B, though, is that he has this deep spiritual Killa Priest side, as seen in 'I'm God' or this. That's one thing about Lil B I never see talked about amongst his blogger fans, yeah he's crazy and weird and whatever, freaky, freaky, freaky freaky flow, but he's also bringing back a kind of merger of spiritual and street shit that the Wu, among others, excelled at with their Five Percenter mumbo jumbo. One of my favorite moments in rap ever is on the largely dismal Wu-Tang Forever, 'The Projects' to be exact, where that little kid tells Rae, 'call me back at the God Hour.' There are a lot of things that you could do in 1997 that you could never do on a huge commercial release today, but one is that skit. I can sit here as an educated well-off white guy and be like, Five Percenterism is some retarded self-serving ghetto shit, but there is a wonderful empowering quality to a religion where all its adherents, mostly underprivileged people, even little kids, are all Gods. You look at rap today and back at Guru's catalogue and one thing that's missing that rap had then, besides the metaphysical concerns that album titles like The Realness or The True Meaning suggest, is religiosity. I imagine some of that is still in the underground but on the street or aboveground level, no one's really doing that anymore. Except for Lil B.

As Seen On Youtube

I was listening to Juelz's 'Murda Murda' and I saw this comment:

Dis da shit!What happened to music??
Everyone talkin how GREAT drake and wayne r....
They WACK there used to be bttr songs out there!In 2001-2006 nd then music just CRASHED!rap music iz GONE and i HATE that!RIP rap music

Those good old days in 2001-2006 when there were bttr songs out there. What really got me though was reading the Source's review of Hard To Earn, where the critic writes that the album (just four mics!) "is definitely a welcome breath of fresh air during this otherwise stale period of rap." The stale period/year that brought you Illmatic, Resurrection, Ready To Die, Outkast's first album, Tical, Do You Want More?, The Main Ingredient, Dare Iz A Darkside, On The Outside Looking In, Keith Murray's debut, Bone Thugs' debut EP, and the quite respectable Blowout Comb. And best of all, this classic.