Silly enough I started liking the album a lot more once I started listening to all of the lyrics. At first I would just be listening to instrumentals that sound like they could pretty easily come of a sound board (they actually deconstruct the beat on the last song and it doesn’t make it sound much more complicated), rhyme patterns that aren’t super complex that I can tell, and themes that seemed to all be about beating somebody up, shooting somebody, or disrespecting women. But the storytelling is really what makes it interesting, I particularly thought a lot about I ain’t the one. It has the theme of disrespecting women but really truthful about hey if you’re going out with ice cube this is what you should expect. Made me think about the parasocial celebrity relationships and how it must be hard to trust either party in them. Overall the thing I kept thinking about was how I wouldn’t really consider this to be “cool” music. It reminded me of the bestie boys which I’m not sure if that predates or was inspired by this sound. This album has a lot of horns and generally felt incredibly upbeat for the themes. There wasn’t a song that felt particularly dark despite having a lot of violence and some darker drug themes. I suppose it feels like more of a celebration of the culture they came from which the stories of which they used to become successful even if the upbringing had darkness in it.
5
Albums Rated
2.8
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