Hot, in the sense that swandiving into a volcano is hot.
Written: Dec 30 '00 (Updated Dec 31 '00)
Product Rating:
Pros: It's not the worst rap music ever produced...
Cons: It's awfully close, however. Where to begin listing the cons? How about: no MC-ing skills, boring programmed beats, offensive and stupid and puerile lyrics, and too much offkey & horrible singing...EVEN by gangsta rap standards!
churst's Full Review: Guerrilla Warfare [PA] by Hot Boys
When it comes to rap music, I have somehow developed an amazing sense of intuition. I wouldn't necessarily qualify it as me being psychic, per se, but when it comes to rap music, there have been many documented (well, by my friends at least) cases of me taking a casual glance at an album cover, turning the case over to check out the song titles, and then immediately KNOWING that I hold in my hands one truly abominable, inexcusably lame, "man, surely there's a copy of WWF - Music With An Attitude we can purchase instead", just plain absolutely awful album.
I'll confess to not having bought this album, but I have had to sit in my office and suffer through "friends" playing parts of it for me (I'm fairly confident that they'll recover from the savage beating I delivered to them in retaliation to suffering through twenty or so seconds of "Help") (memo to one epinion's reader who emailed me a, frankly, very insane and scary email the last time I used sarcasm in one of my articles: that was sarcasm - I didn't actually attack any of them). I also went so far as to Napster a few of the tracks to make sure I was not totally uninformed about the subject material, and listened to all the music clips offered at cdnow.com.
So what is my all-too-informed opinion of "Guerrilla Warfare"? It is a primordial fragment from the original Big Bang of Idiocy. (Note to my insane friend: that was not sarcasm.) They manage to fulfill all the requirements for making a poor excuse for a rap album, which I will go into further detail now.
BEEF #1 WITH THIS ALBUM: and my biggest beef...excessive and horrible singing.
95% of this...presumably...'rap' album consists of the fools SINGING. And no, it's not the sort of singing you'll find on a U2 album, a Meat Beat Manifesto album, an Al Green album, or anything else that would qualify as even remotely listenable. EVERY FREAKING SONG, aside from the (actually not totally idiotic) skit tracks and the intro, has singing in it. Lots of singing. If you hadn't guessed, their voices are horrible - at times one wonders if they gargled with razor blades as a means of gearing up for some of the recording sessions. And, as you probably have guessed, they're off-key on an almost non-stop basis.
Now the thing is, I'm not even truly this angry about their singing simply because it's bad. There's a larger issue here about hiphop in general that I feel the need to address real quick. The unrelenting, merciless, and tireless assault on the ears that is their singing has finally pushed me over the edge, and I'm going to do everyone reading this a great service - by transcribing, in its entirety, a self-help book I'm going to publish soon...entitled "How To Establish Yourself As, At A Minimum, A Half-Way Decent Rapper":
Chapter 1
DO NOT INCLUDE ANY DAMN SINGING IN YOUR DAMN RAP MUSIC.
The End
(I'll have it printed in huge, title scene of the movie "El Cid"-style lettering for added impact.)
I could tolerate a bit of singing on Dr. Dre's "Let Me Ride". Public Enemy, the greatest rap act in history, committed this cardinal sin in "World Tour Sessions" (from their latest and still quite good album "There's A Poison Goin' On"), yet one quick, painless push of the 'next track' button allows me to ignore it safely. Same with several other artists that I almost always give a permament, carved-out-of-stone two thumbs up to.
But no longer! I had an epiphany while sitting through "Respect My Mind"...in between the (many) times where I thought "what is this crap?!", I somehow managed to squeeze in a revelation of sorts:
If I want to hear singing in my music, I'll buy music that isn't in the damn rap section. If I buy an album that is labeled as a RAP album, then there sure as hell had better be RAPPING on that album.
Good rapping and good singing with a good beat results in a pretty decent tune at best (see "No Time To Play", from "Jazzmatazz Vol. 1", by Guru of the group Gangstarr). Bad rapping and horrific singing with a lifeless beat results in something so terrible, that I find the English language's ability to describe it to be sorely insufficient.
Luckily, during my most recent drinking binge, a group of members of the Tau Ceti Myconid race of dancing mushroom aliens aimed one of their transmittal beams directly at me, allowing telepathic communication between us. I asked him/her their opinion, and their reply was:
They then cut off the telepathic link in a fit of rage. If we are wiped out by a highly-powerful alien culture, we now know which music act is to blame. (Note to my sarcasm-impaired friend: I'm not sure if that was sarcasm or not, as again, I was drinking at the time.)
But never mind the possibility of human extermination...the blood pouring from your ears every time you hear the cringe-inducing singing on "Tuesday & Thursday" should serve enough as a testament to the fact that SINGING AND RAP NO LONGER MIX. I'm done taking prisoners and giving them slaps on the wrists and saying "sure, Dre, maybe hearing Nate Dogg crooning about how he and his ni**az are gonna cruise in the six-four tonight on that Murder Was The Case album nearly caused me to go on a Godzilla-esque rampage, but the title song had a dope beat so I won't hold it against you". It's over. NO MORE SINGING AND RAP.
It's not that The Hot Boys are the only ones who have combined horrible singing with other horrible elements, rather it's basically just pure chance that while listening to this particular album, I finally had enough. If Juvenile and crew had just replaced all the singing on the album with silence, it'd be a vast improvement, and the same holds true for way too much rap music nowadays.
BEEF #2 WITH THIS ALBUM: Lyrics that are so idiotic and...haha...juvenile, they manage to transcend "wholly forgettable", with the idiocy permamently branding itself onto your brain.
Apparently these guys coined the phrase "bling-bling". Just that one word (note that it's repeated twice...for double the effect!!!), manages to exhibit more creativity than is found in the rest of their lyrics.
Would you like some examples? No? Too bad - you can't appreciate poor rap music without taking a gander at the lyrics. Herewith a few very brief excerpts, and you can find much more at the following website: http://www.geocities.com/slickcmm/lyrics.html#6 .
And yes, I censored the naughty bits, damn near ruining my asterisk key in the process:
"We On Fire"
what kind of n***a that be full of that 'dro
what kind of n***a freak shop like an eskimo...
say dog, what kind of n***a be on top of the world
million dollar status got me on top of ya girl...
what kind of n***a know what doin' bad is
what kind of n***a know what a stolen Jag is...
what kind of n***a got golds in his mouth
what kind of n***a got hoes that like to pout...
(By the way, I am NOT MAKING UP THAT SECOND LINE. "Freak shop like an eskimo"...what the hell?!)
"Respect My Mind"
You're fake, respect, n***a
You're playin' with the wrong one
I'll break your neck, n***a
You're playin' with the wrong gun
I use K's to wet n***as
I'm sprayin' the whole room
Better watch your back, n***a
(and here's my favorite bit, the chorus...)
Respect my mind or get your brains knocked out
Respect my mind or have them boys in your house
Respect my mind, look, we be ridin' on chrome
Respect my mind 'cause we get our shine on
Respect my mind 'cause we that Hot Boy clique
Respect my mind, n***a, you can't phase this
Respect my mind, look, we'll f*** your b***h
Respect my mind, look, we 'bout that gangsta s***
(Yeah, um, NUFF RESPECT, Hot Boys! *snicker*)
"Too Hot"
She ridin with me thinkin that it's cool and s***
She dont think I know that she let her live loose and s***
I'm gonna pull over pull her out and pop some slugs in the b***h
And leave her p***y stinkin cuz I dont love a b***h
But I was smart comin up, never trust a b***h
And don't hesitate for a minute to chug the b***h
She was tryin to get me locked up
It was a must that the hoe get c**ked up
F***in with me best believe that I'll do ya lots
Got ya sayin them Hot Boy n***as too too hot
Too too hot
(Nothing I could say would be witty or funny enough...just re-read that and wallow in its awfulness.)
And they drone on and on like this throughout the whole damn album. Their most consistent gimmicks are either
A: repeating the same phrase about five thousand times, changing one word each time, or
B: using the same word four times in a row because they couldn't think of anything that rhymes with 's***', 'b***h', or 'n***a'. This crap has convinced me that maybe DMX isn't so bad after all, at least comparatively speaking. (Memo to sarcasm-impaired friend: that was sarcasm - DMX really is that bad too.)
The braindead zombie at cdnow.com who reviewed this album said that - and I quote - "it's this sort of natural rhyming ability that lets Cash Money eclipse others like No Limit". WOW WHAT AN ACHIEVEMENT. Saying that a particular rapper is superior to Master P, C-Murder, Silkk Tha Shocker and company...hell, that's like saying having your leg torn off in a tractor accident is better than losing your head. It's true, but still means absolutely nothing in the overall scheme of things.
I'm still amazed that these idiots had the sheer audacity to write a song entitled "Respect My Mind". Um, guys, pardon me if I question whether or not you even have minds to respect.
BEEF #3 WITH THIS ALBUM: the programmed beats.
I'll probably catch a lot of crap for this, and that's fine. But if this album epitomizes the Dirty South "bounce" sound that I hear so much about, then I can only conclude that by "bounce", they mean "lifeless and utterly devoid of creativity". The most repetitive of drum-n-bass music exhibits every bit as much ingenuity in terms of production techniques as ANY of the songs found here.
The most prevalent drum sound to be found here is something that sounds like someone knocking on a door. The background atmospheric sounds are played in a pattern that somehow manages to lack any sense of melody, and sounds almost identical from one song to the next. They overuse synthensizers to a horrible extent. It literally sounds like somebody took a Casio SK-1 keyboard and just went buck-wild with it.
At least the bass is loud. Maybe if you adjust your equalizer settings properly, you can use that to drown out the other parts of the song, I don't know. I do know that programmed beats can never hold a candle to beats crafted from samples (like most older-school rap music from the late 80s/early 90s), or beats performed with actual instruments (see: Black Eyed Peas, The Roots for more examples of infinitely superior beat production). I guess I can say with a clear conscience that, yes, the production quality in so far as 'how staticy does it sound, how well is it equalized' is pretty good, but that still doesn't absolve the producers of this garbage from the fact that they don't know how to write music. At least with most good rap music, the producers didn't try to pretend that they had a clue as to what they were doing, and instead relied on good samples. The HBs would do well to follow that route.
OVERALL
I hope I made it clear that I really dislike this album. I can't accuse music this bad of catering to a particular crowd, as I can't envision anyone who would willing purchase this music - and then on top of that, enjoy it. Yet somehow they sell a great many albums. So here's a real quick shout-out to the fans of The Hot Boys: no offense, but you scare me.
For my money, Outkast and Goodie Mob remain the only Down South artists I've ever heard that understand what rap/hiphop culture is about. Consider this review an advertisement for Outkast's "Stankonia", an album that is so vastly superior on so many different levels to this garbage that I don't know where to begin. Happy New Year and don't party too hard.
ESSENTIAL TRACKS
see below
SKIP THESE TRACKS
Every one except for "Respect My Mind" - if you want to fully immerse yourself in the awfulness of this album, this is the song that perfectly captures the essence of all that is The Hot Boys. Horrible singing, boring beat, incredibly stupid lyrics...it has those in spades.
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