959 Raekwon - Only Built 4 Cuban Linx (1995)

Studio Album - Hip Hip

About the Act:

Raekwon is an American rapper from New York. He is a member of the Wu-Tang Clan which even I have heard of. In 1995 he released his first solo album ("Only Built 4 Cuban Linx") and has released several more since. He has been credited as a pioneer of "Mafioso Rap" which draws parallels between street crime, particularly organised and gang-related, to mafia-controlled organised crime and/or Latin America organised crime and drug cartels.

About the Album:

This is a well-regarded and hugely influential rap album. Apparently.

My History with this Album:

None

Review:

Finally, the rap album I have been waiting for. Kendrick Lamar and OutKast didn't do the job, because I ended up kinda liking them. This is another story, this panders to my prejudices about rap. I dislike it quite strongly. To be fair, it was not made for me, it was made for tough people, who are prepared for the "musical potency" and "uncut raw" in the album. A Cuban Link is a jewellery chain, apparently a very tough one, so the album title translated is "only built for very tough people". I'm not tough, I'm a soggy middle-class white Brit. I think that means I don't have the capacity to appreciate this for what it is. I can certainly appreciate it for what it isn't.

Musically it's facile. Drum beats, badly played at times, backed by samples taken from other people's music. Maybe there was some art to choosing the samples, maybe not. The format seems to be to pick a sample, loop it over and over while the drum beat pumps, and rap over the top. Sometimes, if you are unlucky, there is more than one sample. I say "unlucky" because there seems to be no concept of actually having things in the same key. At one point there were I think 3 samples going on, all in different keys and one out of tune. It sounded awful. The best bits were when there were female singing voices added, which were sweet and nice and a good distraction from the rest.

To be fair, (and to be honest I don't really feel the need to be fair, but I will be anyway) this is not about the music, it is about the rapping. I recognise that there is skill to the process of rapping, getting a "flow" and a rhythm, and writing words that can be rapped must have some skill to it also. I recognise that this album has a lot of words, and there may even be some cleverness in the choosing of those words. Of course, most of them I cannot hear properly, being heavily accented. Some words do kind of pop out at you so you can catch them. Many of those words are not ones I would repeat in this review. There is swearing, of course, because if you are a rapper, apparently that is big and clever. I acknowledge that culturally this is the rhythm and patois of the street so this is "keeping it real". Some of the words are about shooting people, and drug deals, and doing drugs. Some are macho posturing, and some are about clothes and style. Some are homophobic, and some are probably "dissing" the competition.  Apparently this is a foundational album for "mafioso rap" which links the street crime of the "projects" to glorified fantasies about mafia organised crime.

So, I get that these people may have grown up in a dangerous place, and that some of this is founded in some form of reality, but the glorification of crime, and the seeming revelling in life-breaking habits like drugs and casual violence is not something I can get behind. I know that there is and was a lot of bad stuff going on in poor black neighbourhoods in America. Unless I am taking this album wrongly (and goodness knows I could be), it is celebrating that bad stuff. I don't care if this album is influential and ground-breaking, I don't think it is ground that should be broken. It has negative merit.

2/10

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/7btiyhWzUfzxN3ijSiBpC8

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB7B802978D1C1305

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Only_Built_4_Cuban_Linx...