Forum Overview :: No Stairway to Heaven :: Keepin' it crunk in the drop, on point like some caltrops

[quote name="curst"]Joe Budden I'll admit that I bought it solely on the strength of the beats I heard on amazon.com (not to mention it includes the club-bouncin' single "Focus" from Def Jam Vendetta). Luckily, Joe's pretty damn good on a lyrical level as well. He's the closest thing rap music has to a modern-day Digital Underground - it's nothing truly extraordinary, but it's undeniably damn fun, with the good songs heavily outweighing the dull ones. And while his first two singles have been pure party jams loaded with (some of them pretty funny) one-liners, he can get pretty serious as well while coming off sounding only a little bit corny. I can't emphasize enough how far the beats carry this album by themselves. Whoever the fuck "Whiteboy" is, he's got more soul than Shang Tsung (ha!). Akrobatik: Balance Sadly, the great tune from the game "Frequency" is nowhere to be found here. But on balance (HA!), it's hard to miss it given the strength of his other songs. He's somewhat more cerebral than Budden but functions on the same basic ideal: trying to strike the perfect balance between having fun and being serious. The only downside is that his beats are nothing out of the ordinary. If you've heard any east coast album from the past seven+ years, you have heard these beats already, and that's something that cannot be said about the truly-party-rockin' Budden. Gravediggaz: Nightmare In A Minor A lot of people write off horror-core rap instantly. With the Gravediggaz, you'd have to REALLY dislike the idea in order to hate on them, because they're pretty damn imaginative about it, not to mention that on the very few songs where they drop the schtick and "keep it real", they lose almost nothing in the translation. The RZA and Prince Paul are pretty much nowhere to be found here, so Wu-Tang hanger-ons like 5th Disciple got saddled with most of the production. Thankfully, the end result is still good, but where Prince Paul has one of the best ears for drum rhythms ever, these guys do better at creating eerie gothic shit. If you hate the horror-core schtick, then this won't change your mind at all, but otherwise it's equal to the debut "6 Feet Deep", only it's good for different reasons (the rhymes are cleverer but not quite as brutally funny, the beats are more unusual but not quite as hard-hitting). Prince Paul: Politics Of The Business I can't say anything meaningful that PitchforkMedia hasn't said about this. This is *not* a good parody album, and you're far far FAAAAAAAAAR better off with... The Majesticons: Beauty Party ...which is infinitely funnier and boasts better production (something I should NEVER be able to say about any album competing with Prince motherfucking Paul). Mike Ladd figured out that one of the best ways to parodize something is to actually celebrate that which you're mocking, while taking it to humorously extreme hyperbole. Prince Paul instead merely imitates the object of his scorn, and winds up reducing himself to its level.[/quote]