Thursday, April 26, 2007

Tha Dogg Pound - Dogg Chit Review


I bought this CD about a month ago with the intention of getting a review up pretty quickly. It's not that there's actually an audience for the gangsta stylings of Daz n' Kurupt, anymore. It's just that I freely acknowledge that I'm the last man alive who still buys their shit chit. And, I think I know why.

Tha Dogg Pound is the Hip Hop equivalent of McDonald's. They've been around for 50 years and everyone knows what's on the menu. The food isn't very good and there's no real reason for anyone over the age of eighteen to eat there, but when no one's looking, it can be a great guilty pleasure.

Take the opening track, Get Out My Way, for example. The bombastic production lends a breath of credibility to the duo's empty threats and intimidation. Predictably, this is a theme that's repeated on just about every track, not unlike a side order of fries.

Kurupt turns back the clock to his mid-90s lyrical flow on I'll Bury You, but that's still about five years after his apex on the mic. Meanwhile, Mo Murder is solidly haunting as an instrumental, but the thought of two men older than me planning robberies and drive-bys is…quaint. And, look…The Game has managed to pull himself away from buying up copies of his last album for a guest spot on Anybody Killa. It lifts an old N.W.A. beat, but is weakened by Game's indifferent verse.

The mood lightens up on Vibe, which features an assist from Snoop Dogg. It's not quite one of those always awful "thug in love" songs, but the beat is straight cheese and soft-ass Daz and Kurupt are often fast-fowardable. Immediately afterwards, we careen to the other end of the relationship spectrum with Can't Get Enough. It's got a guest spot from Too Short, 68, so I probably don't need to say any more about it.

(OK, here's the hook: "I can't get enough of your tongue in my p****…can't get enough of your loooooooooove.")

Yep. We finish up with clichéd, but listenable material with self-explanatory titles like Throw Ya Hood Up, Blaze It Up and Blast on 'Em. Hood, weed and guns? Check, check aaaaaaand…check.

Dogg Chit is what it is, kids. Too formulaic to be offensive, as it's the same album these guys have been mass producing since they left Death Row. The beats are tighter than you'd think (in fact, there's an instrumental version of the album available on their website) and, occasionally, Kurupt's shows off his old flow.

If I were writing this for Inside Pulse my teaser would've been "There are worse things to step in." See? That's why they fired me.
Rating: 3 out of 5

2 comments:

Greg Wind said...

Reviewing commercial thug rap that no one cares about? There was a guy at Inside Pulse that used to do that all the time. He was pretty funny, too.

I don't know that he would have come up with "there are worse things to step in," though. That's gold.

Anonymous said...

Just ignore the playa haters, Cam. I'm just glad you remember when rap was still good. Now, try and hunt down that never released Danny Boy album or give us a review of '97s Lady of Rage debut.

Everyone cares about those.