The opening track, “Omen,” is a dark trip, with backward chanting played over a sparse beat while Jadakiss calmly drops “Insane mind / Set the Bible and the flag on fire at the same time.” There’s a vintage DJ Premier appearance on “Move Forward,” replete with signature scratches and piano keys. On this album, like always, The Lox are at their best when it’s just them, over heavy, haunting production. One has to wonder whether these moments echo back to Sheek’s revelation about “Benjamins” - if there will always be a part of the group that goes against their beliefs about what is and isn’t wack in search of something grander, be it a hit or a chance to step into the ring with newer, younger artists. But both tracks, “The Agreement” and “Secure the Bag,” come off as forced, peppered with the same discomfort as some of The Lox’s early Bad Boy tracks.
So, on its face, putting Fetty Wap on the hook of a Lox song seems like a good idea, or having DJ Khaled yelling on a track with Gucci Mane might appear to be logical for 2016. They come from an era when rappers didn’t have to choose between street adoration and chart success.īut the formula for that thin line has shifted since we last met. For both better and worse, this album picks up where The Lox left off. Sheek wants to make sure we know that he, Jadakiss, and Styles P have paid more than enough dues to not give a fuck anymore. On “What Else You Need to Know,” one of the early tracks on the new album, Sheek Louch raps: “Puff played me ‘The Benjamins,’ I thought it was wack / Wrote a verse next day, I brought New York back.” It’s a tone-setter more than anything, an early opportunity to express the boldness we expect from The Lox. Sounding real, as if they never went silent. It’s Beautiful, sounding just like the ’90s again. At the end of last week, The Lox reemerged with an album called Filthy America. There were two reunion EPs, in 20, that didn’t make much noise. After that, there were a handful of solo albums from each member of the trio, many of them quality efforts. They sounded awkward and unsure of themselves then, before finding a comfort zone in Swizz Beatz’s rugged, haunting production for 2000’s We Are the Streets on Ruff Ryders. Their 1998 Bad Boy debut, Money, Power & Respect, was a clumsy effort - too flashy, too littered with glossy Bad Boy signifiers, laced with too many slick choruses. There was a label fight when they jumped off the Bad Boy ship to fold into the Ruff Ryders golden age, then a mostly unspoken hiatus, and that was it. It meant The Lox.īefore last week, The Lox had only produced two proper studio albums as a group over a 22-year career.
It meant something born of the streets, or something able to build a mythology around the streets and sell it without selling out.
#THE LOX WE ARE THE STREETS ALBUM SKIN#
But the “real hip-hop” archetype has jumped into so much new skin that it’s hard to know what it even means anymore. The phrase still exists, popping its head up from time to time, usually when a young rapper born in the late ’90s offers a shocking opinion on an artist that they weren’t alive to experience. As hip-hop’s universe expands and shifts, we’re seeing less and less of “real hip-hop” as a clearly defined idea.