Review: Royce da 5′9 – Street Hop
A truthful survey of my opinion on the current hip-hop game’s climate around the time that Raekwon’s OB4CL2 came out would have included a treatise on the death of the “gangster lyric” in hip-hop. Make no mistake, it isn’t my belief that those lyrics are gone from the landscape, only that they have lost all of the minimal contact with the reality of the artist’s lives that they may have previously had. For as much as the studied observer of hip-hop music and culture may decry the general apostasy from the image and the styles that they’re used to, is it truly possible to deny the disconnect between lyrics and reality? It is the opinion of the writer that a person who has reached a certain age along with a certain level of success should show an appropriate shift in subject matter reflective of their state of being – then again, if you believe that the biggest drug kingpins in New York are 50 Cent, Cam’ron, and Raekwon this argument will continue to be lost on you. The point being, that no matter what a person used to do, the public expects an artist’s message to mature as time goes on and circumstances change. Read more…
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