And now for something completely different...
Seriously, one of the greatest rap albums of all time. 1991s O.G. dropped at a transitional period in hip-hop.
Yo! MTV Raps was busy exposing millions of suburban white kids to acts like N.W.A. every afternoon after school. Hair metal and synth pop was dying, and no one was sure what was going to fill the void. Faith No More, Alice in Chains, and others were taking the music on the radio in a whole new direction. For gods sake, there was a Public Enemy/Anthrax/Sister's of Mercy tour! Nirvana's
Nevermind and Pearl Jam's
10 didn't come out until late summer. The summer that the first Lallapalooza tour kicked off. Suddenly everybody went from being a Warrant fan, to a Rollin's Band fan. Strange times indeed. Though on the cusp on the grunge age, nobody knew what it would be that would claim the attention of that particular generation of American youth. It came close to being Ice-T and his brand of rap.
Already a well known emcee, O.G. really displays Ice's lyrical ability all the way through the album. Still full of himself, still bragging about what a tough guy he is and how many women he's fucked, Ice also matures on this album and speaks intelligently about social injustice, about race relations, about abused children, and about how being in the ghetto isn't really all that great. He also introduces Body Count to the world, which was a hell of a brave thing for him to do at that time, even if it ultimately wasn't so well executed. (His cover of Black Flag's Police Story on a tribute album is brilliant. But I digress...)
Really smart lyrics, with samples of Black Sabbath and Led Zepplin mixed in with the standard James Brown/Funkadelic fare of the age, that show he's not nearly the one trick pony many of his contemporaries were/are.
ICE-T O.G. Original Gangster.http://www.mediafire.com/?iyymq2kmxm2