Ah, the hip-hop mixtape. Usually, it's an art form designed to be listened to and quickly forgotten; a chance to show off a rapper's skills and tide fans over until a real album. But it took four years for Clipse to follow up
Lord Willin' with the masterpiece
Hell Hath No Fury, and this was one of the only things we got to tide us over. Clipse seem to have realized this and stepped up their game--certainly it's one of the few mixtapes that is comparable in quality to a regular album. Granted it still falls victim to some of the same problems as other mixtapes (some mismatches between beats and vocals, outdated cultural references, occasional moments where the rappers seem like they're treading water, underwritten lines) but the highpoints outweigh the low ones. The first half of this record is one hot line after another--"Re-Up Intro" in particular is about as great a trunk-banger as I've ever heard; car stereo systems were
built to blast this track. Their take on the Game's "Hate It Or Love It" knocks his out of the water, and "Zen" is just as much of a classic single as it ever was. So overall this is about as great as an intrinsically flawed type of record can be; mixtapes are generally never more than placeholders, but this is one of the first times the word "mixtape" didn't seem to connote "something we threw together in two days to keep us in the public eye." Great, and a nice appetizer to the atom bomb these guys would drop on our heads a year later.
MY RATING:
8.1
Clipse - "Re-Up Intro"
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