A.B.N. f/ Bulletproof - "3-16's" (mp3)

It's funny, even though at one point my other blog was well known as a source for Houston rap coverage and one of the guys that used to write for it was totally obsessed with that stuff, I've always been kind of disinterested in that scene. I love and respect the elder statesmen, Scarface and UGK and so on, but most of the crop of post-DJ Screw rappers that made the city a hotspot a few years ago struck me as kind of talentless and corny (or, in Chamillionaire's case, talented and corny). So I didn't buy enough into the candy paint and drank mythology to get too sucked into it when the hype reached a fever pitch, and I wasn't surprised when most of those artists fell off the radar almost as quickly as the stormed onto it. But I always kinda liked the music I heard from Z-Ro and Trae, and their group name Assholes By Nature seemed cool as fuck to me ever since dk's posts on Gov't Names way back in 2005 about their "upcoming" album, which just finally dropped this July.

That album, It Is What It Is, is pretty damn good, too, these 2 guys with really distinctive, low, smokey voices calmly talking shit over slow, lush organ beats and those weird faux-West coast synth whine tracks that Houston rap has always been great at. "3-16's" has probably one of the last outside productions Pimp C did while he was alive, and it's some pretty awesome and somewhat uncharacteristically ominous shit. The song about slapping the shit out of Mike Jones, "S.O.S.", might come off as some lame beef shit, but now after Trae actually did give Jones a bloody nose since the album dropped, it's actually pretty funny. It's really just a pretty great regular-ass rap album that you can jam front to back during an era when there's a lot of hyped up "great" albums that are uneven as fuck and almost impossible to listen to all the way through.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 30, 2008 at 10:05 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.