Devish NAACP gettin' me all worked up. I almost forgot to run this week's album.
Today's album, Masta Ace's
Slaughtahouse, was one of the first hip-hop albums to cast a critical eye on that whole gangsta genre. What's more, this came out in 1993, when gangsta rap was really emerging as the dominant paradigm. In their year-end review of the albums of the year, The Source (back when it was actually worth reading) called Slaughtahouse "the moral center of hip-hop."
Ace wastes no time getting at the gangstas, doing a spoken word intro and then a Hardcore Rap 101 skit.
Teacher: Now when you rhyme, you hafta say that you smoke blunts. *underlines on chalkboard* Also you hafta mention that you drink 40's. You hafta mention that you carry a 9 millimeter, a tec-9, a mac 10, a M16, or an Uzi. *underlines on chalkboard* Does anybody have any questions?
Student: Excuse me, but I don't have a gun.
Teacher: It's not IMPORTANT if you have a gun or not. Just ACT LIKE you have a gun.
That's followed by the title song, which is in two parts. First is a parody of a gangsta act which features two MCs, MC Negro and the Ig'nant MC. Following that comes Ace, literally setting the record straight and mapping out the focus of the album.
One of the strongest element's of Ace's skills is his ability to really paint a picture of what's going on in a neighborhood. Not that ludicrous Ludacris/Nelly/NWA reality where everybody's either shooting somebody or getting some at every moment of the day, but in the Village Ghetto Land sense of describing what's there. This, from Late Model Sedan:
Cause my man Shiloh, is out on the prowl
With some East Medina, brothers that's foul
Lookin to protect, the streets that our mothers
Have to walk on, from black young brothers
It's bad enough, that if I walk through a white
Neighborhood, that, I gotta be prepared for a fight
Why should I be scared of the dark
Skin on a brother that be lurkin in the park
I oughta be safe in a black neighborhood
But someone's always up to no good
Niggaz ain't never gonna make no progress
Killin one another, but you know I guess
I'm feelin thirsty, I'm goin to the store
If anybody calls, I went to the store!
Oh. And somebody should spit this to Kweisi while he's trying to get at Black conservatives:
As I walk through Brooklyn, Compton or whatever,
I wonder why black folks don't wanna stick together.
We talk about justice, and how little we get,
yet black men be killin' black men for talkin' shit... (right...right...)
(";Here's the one, that one that always talkin' shit...";) [gun shots]
How the hell we supposed to wage war against the powers that be
when we are still our own worst enemy?
Instead of worrying about the laws going back to 1963, how about trying to get the murder rate and out-of-wedlock birth rate to where they were in 1963?