This is a busy day/week for me at work, so I’ll have to keep this short.
This album is very much a product of the time, so before I start I’ll mention some obvious stuff that doesn’t hold up super well. The beats can be repetitive and the rhymes/flows, my modern standards, are terrible. If a modern rapper came out sounding like this, nobody would buy that album.
Now that that is out of the way, I love this album. When I first got in to rap (outside of weird underground stuff), this is the sort of stuff I listened to. I was in my “modern rappers just rap about bitches and money, old rapers rapped about real stuff” phase. While I outgrew that phase, it is nice to hear some blatantly political rap. I checked and this was the fifth best selling rap album of 1988, beaten by “Straight Outta Compton”, “Eazy-Duz-It”, “He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper” and “Life Is…Too $hort”. Not bad to be behind NWA, Eazy-E, Will Smith (and DJ Jazzy Jeff) and Too $hort. I also fucking love the scratching on some of these beats. That old school sound of a DJ scratching records always gets me hype.
Favorite track is Bring the Noise and Show 'Em Whatcha Got. Bring The Noise is a classic and I just really like what they did with the saxophone sample on Show 'Em Whatcha Got.