|
REVIEW:
Overall Rating:
 
Lyrics:
Beats:
Written By:
The Reccollectah
Napoleon,
somewhere halfway this album:
“Yeah, this
is what muthafuckas been waiting for right here, kid
Napoleon, Mr. Virginia, on that V.A. shit
You know what I mean, take two of these from the
muthafucking hood
And you put 'em in the studio, this is what you come up with
A ghetto classic, you know what I mean”
Unfortunately
, I don’t … at all.
For anyone who
followed all things Wu in the nineties Napoleon certainly
isn’t an unknown name as he raised many eyebrows together
with Joe Mafia and Myalanski on the Wu Syndicate album where
they combined very solid rhyming with even more solid
production resulting in a true ghetto classic . So with this
in the back of my mind, a Napoleon solo certainly got me
interested back in 2007 when it came out. But alas, my
interest pretty soon turned into disappointment. I can sum
the album up in one sentence for the people who hate reading
or have some urgent business to attend to:
While the
album starts and ends OK, I have to say old Napoleon/Wu
Syndicate fans get disappointed enormously by the middle
part consisting of a whole bunch of very off-putting songs
dipped in a irritating, commercial Southern sound.
‘Cause let’s
be serious: if you got to know Napoleon back in ’99 on
tracks like ‘Thug War’ , ‘The Hit’, ‘Global Politics’ or the
beautiful ‘Weary eyes’ then 2/3 of these tracks are a slap
in your face. Whoever got to know Napoleon back then was
heavily (and probably still is) into the Wu Sound … these
fans don’t want to hear these lukewarm, ‘here today gone
tomorrow’ commercial beats from the South ... not even at
gunpoint.
For instance
songs like ‘It is what it is’, ‘Patron’ and the horrible ‘V.I.P.’
, from a Wu fan’s point of view ( which you can assume we
embody here on Wu-International ) , sound extremely annoying
and make you press skip after just a few seconds. When I
first heard this album in 2007, I pressed “skip” a lot to be
honest …
Like I said it
starts rather ok with the first two tracks but it rapidly
turns into a “press skip”- adventure for the bigger middle
part of the album . Only the truly superb ‘Game recognizes
game’ ft Ghostface, ‘Let me live’ (over a Belly of the Beats
instrumental I can imagine that same Ghost having a go at
too) and an R’n'B orientated ‘Lonely at the top’ manage to
score good marks. The rest ? Well, by doing this review I
had to sit through all of those songs repeatedly … not a
pleasant experience. Tracks like ‘Don status’, ‘My hood’ and
‘Gangsta’ represent everything I don’t look for in hip hop
and made me want to find a way to carve them out of the disc
for good … ( So I’ll be typing the rest of this review with
bloody blisters).
Luckily
towards the end it gets better again but I can imagine a lot
of people who checked this didn’t even make it till the end
of the album and therefore have no idea what is hidden in
the last part of the disc. The last four tracks all manage
to restore my faith a little bit again e.g. a nice ‘Make
money’ ft Jim Jones and ‘Premeditated murder’ where Napoleon
tries the G-funk approach with good result. ‘Movie star’ has
a rather melancholic, calm beat but holds my attention till
it fades out.
Lyrically it
seems these Southern beats didn’t inspire Napoleon at all:
if you did quite a bid in jail I suppose you have a lot of
time to think about life and where you want to go with it
upon release but instead 90 % of the lyrics can be brought
back to two words: “big pimpin“. Where an MC like Ice T used
to focus on this too back in the early nineties but knew to
bring it with witty humour and sharp lyrics and an often
surprising message , here it mostly results in uninspired
and rushed clichés. Exceptions are the following :
“True
Hollywood Story” (where he looks back at his life and career
till now and of course deals with the Wu Syndicate
situation) , in ‘Lonely at the Top’ we get an introvert
Napoleon reminiscing over his lifestyle and ‘Maximum
security’ where Napoleon and an impressive Crook Nitty
describe life behind bars.
Final conclusion:
It seems with this release Napoleon was on one hand still
aiming at pleasing his old fans but much more at gaining new
fans by embracing the popular beats and sounds from the
South. Which seems to me a combination of goals that is
destined to fail.
Old Wu
Syndicate fans get extremely frustrated listening to this
and as for pleasing the younger rap fans who mostly have no
clue who Napoleon is , I assume there were already more than
enough Southern rappers to chose from in 2007.
So my advice
to Napoleon would be to make up his mind what direction he
wants to take with his career : to either go for the
underground raw hip hop or for the commercial southern rap
style, instead of hopping back and forth between both on one
album. If he chooses the first, then he needs to surround
himself with a talented underground beatmaker to give him
the real deal and form a crew with some other MC’s to
inspire him lyrically so he can keep his lyrics more varied
and back at a higher level. (*)
Feel free to (dis)agree.
(*) Luckily, that’s just what the man has been doing lately.
As we speak the man seems to be the driving force behind
Illuminatti Network aka Wuminati: a new super-hero comic
influenced group under Wu, combining talents from the East,
West, South and even Europe! Wuminati is apparently planning
to release its first project in 2011 so let’s hope Napoleon
and his new crew will make this a triumphant return to form
so we can quickly forget this very disappointing album.
<Read Other Album Reviews> |
