The Music Next Door...

#115 2Pac - Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z.

“Pump your fists like this / Holla if ya hear me - pump! pump! - if you’re pissed / To the sell-outs, living it up / One way or another you’ll be giving it up / I guess because I’m black born / I’m supposed to say peace, sing songs, and get capped on / But it’s time for a new plan / I’ll be swinging like a one man clan”

The qualities of music, good or bad, are hard to articulate at the best of times, so let’s start with some fairly superficial things. God that’s an ugly album cover - an early ’90s cyberpunkadelic nightmare that has very little (read: nothing) to do with the music contained within. Seriously, it looks like a cheap paperback reprint of a William Gibson novel. Bad. Then again, there are probably countless Pen & Pixel album covers that are worse than this.

Secondly, what a stupid name for an album. I’m pretty sure I’ve read somewhere that that is actually a backronym for something stupid. He was only 21 at the time - I guess such things were still a novelty for him. Still, stupid.

So what about the music? It’s great, in spite of (or because of? I’m not sure) the fairly dated electro-funk production, supplied primarily by Digital Underground (of ‘The Humpty Dance’ fame), where 2Pac got his start as a breakdancer or something. The first two songs ‘Holla If Ya Hear Me’ and ‘Point tha Finga’ are both thumping, noise-filled Public Enemy-style rants against government and police brutality and such things. I guess 2Pac had a reason to feel threatened, considering the inexplicable (from a logical point-of-view; from a historical perspective it was completely predictable) moral panic that occurred following the release of the underrated 2Pacalypse Now.

‘I Get Around’ and ‘Keep Ya Head Up’ are probably the two other best known tracks, but the entire album is highly consistent and listenable, assuming you can put up with the borderline-toxic levels of vocoder present (I guess Zapp fetishism was well and truly in force by ‘93). Anyway, it’s a great album - he’d do better soon, but that doesn’t negate the power and energy it.

#118 Snoop Dogg - Tha Doggfather

“It takes a whole lot to be number one / I can’t walk down the street without my gun / I can’t trust these niggas, fool / It ain’t no fun / I’m sittin’ up in court / ‘Cause somebody got dumped / What really counts is how the crowd bounce / Go home and say ‘Snoop rocked the party’ / Nobody got killed / It’s what got announced”

So basically, Dr. Dre left Death Row Records, the empire he’d created, for the greener pastures of his new Suge Knight-less Aftermath Records. Unfortunately for Snoop, he was stuck at Death Row, without the support of his mentor. With that context in mind, it’s kind of remarkable how good an album this is, even if it doesn’t ever reach the (pretty fucking amazing) heights of Doggystyle. In fact, despite his huge body of work since, I’d argue that this is still Snoop’s second best album, even if it is demonstrative of the diminishing returns that have plagued his output.

First things first, if you were expecting something akin to Doggystyle, you’d probably be rather disappointed by this. It’s hard to explicate just how powerful and distinctive a style Dr. Dre’s early-’90s production style was - he took those buzzy, hard-edged bass synths from P-Funk tracks like ‘Flashlight’ and ‘Knee Deep’, and added a real sense of menace - not dissimilar in concept to the Ramones’ brutal deconstruction of ’60s pop, or, for a more familial example, Public Enemy’s transformation of soul and funk into an agitprop sonic collage. On Tha Doggfather, production is handled primarily by DJ Pooh and Daz Dillinger, both of whom are quite competent producers (check out Daz’s work on Dogg Food or All Eyez on Me for proof), but neither of whom really bring out Snoop’s best qualities. The P-Funk influences are still there (plus a catchy but blatant Gap Band retread), but the tracks are too mellow, too distant. They don’t provide the propulsion that Snoop’s nimble flow requires, so he ends up sounding lazy a lot of the time.

What separates this album from the majority of Snoop’s later output, however, is the simple fact that it sounds like he gave a shit when he made it. The songs are diverse, imaginative (ignore the Biz Markie cover, please), and interesting, covering a large variety of styles and themes. Snoop is not a great lyricist by any means, but here he at least seems to try - something that can’t necessarily be said for a lot of the crap he’s released since.

#123 Public Enemy - Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age

“I never did represent doing dumb shit / Some gangstas lying - I’d rather diss Presidents / Dead or alive, bring ‘em and I’ll swing ‘em / I vocalise, I just rap, I don’t sing ‘em / Flick ‘em, and I fling ‘em, you can go with ‘em / Hall of Fame for the game, for the points I Dave Bing ‘em”

What a terrible album title! Who possibly thought that was a good idea?

Anyway, I guess this is kind of the beginning of PE’s gradual slide into complete irrelevance, but it’s actually not much worse than their previous albums. I mean, it’s funny that at the time a lot of critics lauded this as being a return to form, despite the fact that Apocalypse 91 (their previous actual album; I’ve never heard Greatest Misses, and I don’t really have any great desire to do so) was possibly the greatest thing they’d ever release. Then again, a lot of other critics hated it, which I guess is the thing about this album - it was the first from the group that really polarised their audience. Let’s face it, already having three classic albums under your belt (Yo! Bum Rush the Show is great, but not a classic in the same way) is a pretty difficult legacy to live up to and sustain. Frankly, the fact that the group has managed to stay together for so long is pretty remarkable in itself.

Production-wise, this is surprisingly inconsistent (I don’t mean that in a bad way - ‘diverse’ is probably a better term), with classic Bomb Squad noise cacophonies sitting next to surprisingly restrained, rock-ish numbers like ‘Give It Up’. I guess this irritated people at the time, but today, it makes for a really interesting listen. Chuck D’s lyrics are still great here, and whilst his flow is pretty simplistic for ‘94, he hasn’t yet devolved into just shouting slogans, as he seems to do on a lot of their more recent work.

This is certainly an album that has improved with time - I imagine in the context of 1994 this sounded really anachronistic (I mean, think of all the albums that came out that year: Illmatic, Ready to Die, Doggystyle, Niggamortis, Resurrection, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, Hard to Earn, The Sun Rises in the East, Creepin On Ah Come Up, you get the point), but today, it just sounds like another great, fun Public Enemy album. Admittedly, there are too many interludes/non-musical filler, but they don’t really detract from the actual songs.