With Death Row Records, one of the seminal labels of Nineties rap, in stunning disarray, everyone left on the roster is scrambling for safe ground. Kurupt and Snoop Dogg took separate routes out of the ruins and ended up in markedly different places.
A stalwart of Snoop's former posse, the Dogg Pound, Kurupt bolted from Los Angeles, headed back to Philadelphia,
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his hometown, and signed a major-label deal that included his own record company. His new double CD,
Kuruption, bristles with the energy of a major talent stepping out of the shadows into the spotlight.
With one CD devoted to "East Coast," the other to "West Coast," Kurupt attempts to ease the tensions along rap's ever-rumbling fault line. The East's hard-edged urban paranoia ripples through "It's a Set Up" and "5 Mics," while "Another Day" epitomizes the West's weary, sun-soaked fatalism. Kurupt's urgent flow, derived from his idol Rakim, unifies the two discs, but Kuruption, like virtually all two-CD sets, could easily have been pared down to one. Still, "scared money don't make no money," as Kurupt notes on "Another Day," and this bold album positions the rapper nicely for the moneymaking millennium.
Snoop would have done well to follow Kurupt's advice about "scared money," because Da Game Is to Be Sold, Not to Be Told plays like a seventy-five-minute crisis of confidence. Snoop has sought refuge in the hitmaking hands of Master P, the entrepreneurial force behind the New Orleans label No Limit. The label's front-line soldiers – Silkk the Shocker, Mystikal, Fiend and, of course, the Master himself – all march in to support Snoop, but the languorous rapper seems overwhelmed in their presence.
Snoop mouths his new crew's party line ("No Limit is the label that pays me," he now dutifully intones), but enough similarities exist between the Southern grooves of No Limit's production team and the chronic-town beats of Death Row that nothing on Da Game sounds shocking – and that's the problem. Dropping his "Doggy" middle name is as radical a move as Snoop makes. Attempts to recycle such definitive Snoop moments as "Gin and Juice" ("Gin and Juice II") and the immortal "Nuthin' but a 'G' Thang" ("Still a G Thang") fall flat.
Only the desperate stoicism of "Slow Down" – helped by a deft lift from the Loose Ends song of the same name – and "Don't Let Go" convey anything of what Snoop must have gone through in recent years. Da Game will sell all right, but Snoop hasn't told his story with conviction. Until he does, he'll never be the big Dogg he once was. (RS 795)
ANTHONY DECURTIS
