Word: gangstas
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...band's 1993 debut album, "Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)" was rough and rambling, combining ragged street beats with lyrical imagery and audio samples drawn from Hong Kong martial arts flicks. At a time when West Coast gangsta rap was dominating the hip-hop scene, the arrival of the Staten Island, New York-based Wu-Tang announced that the East Coast was not to be ignored. The group's last major album, the ambitious 1997 double album "Wu-Tang Forever," was a challenging, complex work of urban sprawl, spilling over with rude wordplay, goofy ideas, bad attitude and mumbled...
...imagine hip-hop fans' paying attention to a cd that philosophizes about mortality, at least not without a good shoot-out at the end. A purist mentality kept the genre loaded down with hard-core rappers, most of whom stuck with traditional formulas: shunning live instruments and embracing gangsta bravado. "I love hip-hop, so what I do is done with respect," says Everlast, "but there was a very closed-minded attitude toward live instruments and music that wasn't hard core. I wanted to get out of that...
Neil Young was right: rock 'n' roll can never die. The wildly talented alternative-rock band Nirvana, so self-aware and yet so self-destructive, penned rock's suicide note. Hootie-lite fluff bands like Matchbox Twenty supplied the sleeping pills. And gangsta-rap acts like Jay-Z, gloating over their genre's dominance in the marketplace, delivered the eulogy. But rock still isn't dead. In fact, in the past two years it has been rejuvenated creatively and commercially by hip-hop rock acts such as Deftones and others. And this week rock receives another jolt of new life...
...this for Lee: he is an equal-opportunity annoyer. He condemns whites for manufacturing the old image of the shiftless, larcenous Negro and for still seeing blacks through that warped prism. He also chastises blacks for inhabiting restrictive new and polar-opposite categories: the gangsta and the Buppie. Satire typically proceeds from two impulses: rage at the powerful and contempt for the masses. Lee has both...
...either intentional or not), Foxx's talent manages to shine through. Ironically, the album's strong diversity also provides its only weakness. How does a love song entitled "Remarkable" from Jaheim make it onto an album with songs such as "Sex, Sex, Money, Money" and "I Love Being a Gangsta?" Despite this, the soundtrack is worth a listen from hip-hop heads of all types...