Oh yeah, anyone reading this who missed the aforementioned time period, you should buy this album.This is our best seller for a reason. You should learn to appreciate golden eras for what they are, dun. The Lox themselves reflected on their time with Bad Boy saying "it was like playing for the Chicago Bulls", and they probably wouldn't have defected to Ruff Ryders if BIG hadn't died, but curmudgeons like Max just want to knock it because it was popular. For a brief time in the late 90s, you could hear true street music stylized to sound like it would take over every club and radio in the world.
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Commercial and hardcore are incidental qualities that exist in tandem on most rap records, and Puffy did more than anyone in the 90's to combine the two on the same tracks - so no, his signing of the Lox wasn't unusual, it was brilliant.
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'commercial') onto hip-hop, which means you fundamentally misunderstand the rap game. Max, you try to enforce a false rock-music dichotomy (of 'hardcore' vs. And I love golden era Bad Boy, shiny suits and all, just like Kanye does, so swallow that irony. I think dope shit like Pieces of a Man-era AZ is actually dope. Unlike Max, I think everything Kanye West has done has been a pile of critical-darling dog poo. As such, the album is difficult to listen to today: never have the individual topics of money, power, and respect come across as so goddamn unappealing. All three emcees are decent enough (they all have room for improvement, which is how you're supposed to sound on a debut album), and they fare much better as a cohesive unit than when they are singled out on Money, Power, & Respect, but Puff Daddy, with his focus on business before music, failed to include anything entertaining on here. The radio-friendly efforts all sound completely foreign to Jadakiss, Styles, and Sheek, who are all game enough to play along (to their credit), but tracks such as “If You Think I'm Jiggy” and “So Right” have the adverse effect of making their actual street songs sound less authentic, too. Sigh.įINAL THOUGHTS: The Lox's Money, Power, & Respect aims for the middle ground between The Notorious B.I.G.'s drug dealing theatrics and Ma$e's pop leanings (which were all a product of Puffy's imagination anyway), and ends up disappointing both audiences. (Kim appears mainly because Puff Daddy threw her into the mix: after the passing of The Notorious B.I.G., he never could get rid of her.) While the overall effort is alright (this sounds very dated today, but I remember liking it back in 1998), The Lox are actually the worst aspects of the track, as they all sound relatively bored: when X steps into the booth and steals the show with an energetic verse, it's a welcome diversion. DMX's guest spot serves a dual purpose: not only was he hip hop's reigning cameo king back in 1998 (hell, I bet there were rap albums back then where a DMX appearance was contractually obligated before the label would agree to release it to stores, he popped up that fucking often), he was also the starting quarterback of the Ruff Ryders camp, a crew that also counted his Yonkers homeboys The Lox within its ranks, so this could be considered a family posse cut. The second single, which sounds dramatic enough without Little Kimberly's chorus, thank you very much.
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This wasn't as terrible as it should be, but it also isn't very good: I prefer the remix that The Neptunes were commissioned for, since at least Pharrell and Chad abandon the Rod Stewart concept-jacking in favor of actual club spins, and does so successfully. Anyway, I've always liked Styles P.'s contribution, as he shows his progressive side when he tells us, “Regardless who she fucked, I'm the n-a she deserves”, but then abandons that facade with the admission that “Sheek don't like her, had a dream where he shot her”. Wow, when you see it written out like that, not only does it look like a poor business strategy, it also appears to be really fucking stupid. Puffy has also coerced Jadakiss into singing the chorus in the style of Rod Stewart's “If You Think I'm Sexy”, which no, I did not just make that up. Sheek, Styles, and Kiss all hit on chicks at the club over this Dame Grease production, but not very convincingly, as all three sound like they have better things to do. The shiny-suit-wearing first single (if you don't count “We'll Always Love Big Poppa”, anyway) that sounds like the complete opposite of what The Lox allegedly stand for.