Word: albums
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Snoop wants out of the dog-house. Snoop Dogg was one of gangsta rap's first megastars, but as of late, his album sales have slumped. This year Master P, the head of the New Orleans-based label No Limit Records, is the top dog in the gangsta world: Master P's current solo album sold more than 400,000 copies in its first week out; at the upcoming MTV Music Video Awards, he'll be a featured act. So Snoop has allied himself with No Limit, declaring himself a "No Limit soldier," sharing in Master P's heat...
...good influence or a bad one? Will he be Snoop's Obi-Wan Kenobi or his Darth Vader? Certainly, Master P lacks no talent in the marketing department. In a few short years he has built impressive brand identity, and every few weeks a new No Limit album by a previously little-known performer debuts in the upper reaches of Billboard magazine's album charts. One of his slyest techniques is to include in his CDs--like his current solo album, MP Da Last Don--promotional materials for his other records...
Past efforts show that Master P, who is executive producer of Snoop's album, knows his way around a studio. There are a few songs on his CDs Ghetto D and I Got the Hook-Up that have an earthy seductiveness. But he tends to dwell on the same subjects (guns, drugs, women), and he does so with a numbingly brutal attitude and the same spare rhythms and catchphrases (one of his favorites is the primal cry of "Ugh!" to punctuate a song...
...hipper than hip-hop, cooler than punk and masters of both. The trio's over-the-top boasts seemed to send up each genre's excesses. But the Beasties' new CD comes across not as a send-up but as a limp imitation of more interesting performers. The album's buzzing, beeping, video-game-like sound is an exhausted ripoff of hip-hop folk star Beck. A few songs work, like the sci-fi rap number Intergalactic. But for the most part, listening to this album is a tedious, dispiriting task not unlike sorting a backlog of junk e-mail...
...song Siouxsie and the Banshees had covered in the past. The second encore was the high-light of the evening. Siouxsie at her best sang as Cale strummed an electric viola for a stunning performance of "Venus in Furs," a song from the legendary 1967 album The Velvet Underground and Nico. Though originally Lou Reed had sung the lyrics, Sioux's appropriation of the words, "shiny shiny, shiny boots of leather," lent the song a sexy feminine air, which perfectly complemented Cale's viola and the band's performance as the spotlights bounced their golden drops from Siouxsie's vinyl...