Latifah is a pioneering female hip-hop MC. While we’ve had some female artists doing a bit of rapping, it’s usually been as part of a more blended genre like new jack swing. This is the first woman on the list giving it the full hip-hop treatment. While it would have been nice if there’d been a “sista” on the mixing as well, the backing work here is done by DJ Mark the 45 King and other such hip-hop nicknames as Daddy-O and Prince Paul. And Latifah herself as well.
And we get what we’ve come to expect from hip-hop; some stitched together samples to create a (largely) funky bed, bass riffs and drum fills from other people pulled apart and glued back into something new, over the top of which Latifah spits rhymes (as they say). And, as we might expect, these are tracks from a female perspective, a mix of female empowerment with social commentary on the reality of life as a black woman, along with a call to arms for change.
So The Evil That Men Do, for example, is about a mix of social evils – wealth inequality (“Someone's living the good life, tax-free, except for a girl, can't find a way to be crack free”), street violence (“It's time to teach the deaf, the dumb, the blind, that black-on-black crime only shackles and binds”) and so on. Ladies First is a duet with Monie Love and is a twist on the usual hip-hop boasting track, in this case all about how, yes, women can rap too
“The ladies will kick it, the rhyme that is wicked
Those that don't know how to be pros get evicted
A woman can bear you, break you, take you
Now it's time to rhyme, can you relate to
A sister dope enough to make you holler and scream”
Come Into My House features house beats, and Latifah touches on reggae a little bit as well as the more funk-based rhythms. The Pros uses some reggae beat, and Princess Of The Posse (another boast track) leans into it hard, with the chorus delivered in Jamaican patois over a reggae beat (“The Princess of the Posse, me say she a cool one, She rhyme on me record and she ram jam me gun”). Although earlier on Latifah announces that “I’m not a dread, I’m not a rasta” there's an element here to Pan-Africanism and the identity of the "black diaspora".
It makes a nice change of pace, because one thing I’ve found with hip-hop is that once you’ve established the format, each track tends to be pretty much like another. Don’t get me wrong, I liked this; as with jazz I’m surprised how much I like each track, but it works better one track at a time rather than an hour of them back-to-back. Latifah’s got a good voice and I can see why she’s drifted more towards more conventional singing in recent times – she can. There’s a sense of playfulness about the album, even when it’s attacking violence and poverty, that makes it feel less like being in a road rage incident compared to the likes of NWA, and more like having a sensible conversation with somebody.
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