Deep Album Cuts Vol. 212: Cam'ron




I wanted to feature a New York rapper in this volume just to salute the 212 area code, so I was thinking of some guys that I hadn't covered yet in this series, and Cam came to mind. 

Cam'ron deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. That's Me (featuring Keisha "Honey" Cargill)
2. I Just Wanna (featuring Juelz Santana)
3. Killa Cam (featuring Opera Steve)
4. I'm Ready (with Jim Jones and Juelz Santana)
5. We Got It (featuring Ma$e)
6. Welcome To New York City (featuring Jay-Z and Juelz Santana)
7. Bubble Music
8. I.B.S.
9. Come Home With Me (featuring Juelz Santana and Jim Jones)
10. More Gangsta Music (featuring Juelz Santana)
11. Purple Haze
12. Losin' Weight (featuring Prodigy)
13. Losing Weight, Pt. 2 (featuring Juelz Santana)
14. Losin' Weight 3
15. Curve
16. Do It Again (featuring Destiny's Child and Jim Jones)
17. Confessions
18. Harlem Streets

Tracks 5 and 17 from Confessions Of Fire (1998)
Tracks 1, 12 and 16 from the S.D.E. (2000)
Tracks 2, 6, 9 and 13 from Come Home With Me (2002)
Tracks 4 and 11 from Diplomatic Immunity by The Diplomats (2003)
Tracks 3, 7, 10 and 18 from Purple Haze (2004)
Track 8 from Killa Season (2006)
Track 15 from Crime Pays (2009)
Track 14 from Purple Haze 2 (2019)

There was a point when liking Cam'ron and The Diplomats kind of felt like a meme to me and I kinda distanced myself from the whole thing and became partisan about preferring State Property or The LOX, etc. But now that some time has passed, those corny associations have fallen away a little bit and I still do enjoy a lot of music from Cam and Dipset's peak. And I wanted to include Diplomatic Immunity since it was credited to 'Cam'ron presents The Diplomats' and is really one of my favorite albums from the era, right up there with Cam's best solo albums. 

Obviously, Cam growing up with Dame Dash and making the jump to Roc-A-Fella was a really serendipitous boost for his career, particularly because The Blueprint had just come out and Cam ended up having chemistry with Just Blaze and Kanye West and being able to run with their sound and put his own spin on it. But sometimes I think Cam deserves more credit for how much he and Juelz and Jimmy had most of their sound and attitude all figured out on the excellent and underrated S.D.E., pretty much everything except the sped up soul samples. And obviously they later brought up their own stable of producers like the Heatmakerz and AraabMuzik that helped make the Dipset sound something distinct from the Roc-A-Fella sound. Back in 2006 I interviewed Stay Gettin' Productions, the Baltimore production duo who did "Bubble Music" and a number of other memorable Cam'ron/Diplomats tracks (including "Dead Motherfuckers," "Shut The Fuck Up," and "Girls, Cash, Cars")

It might sound weird to say a rapper is obsessed with rhymes, but Cam'ron really has that palpable love of playing with the sound of words that sometimes leads him to say some silly outlandish things that no other MC would think to say, but that's definitely part of his charm. "Confessions" from his first album is almost like proto-Eminem the way he strings together all these shock raps about taboo subjects with the most absurd and cartoony internal rhyme schemes possible. And "I.B.S." is a really interesting song because Cam really opened up about his health issues and was surprisingly vulnerable but still managed to just go nuts rhyming about it. 
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