While there's no doubt that Lil Wayne currently holds the thrown as rap's most prolific wordsmith, few have matched the consistency of the Re-Up Gang in recent years. The Clipse first teamed up with Philly rappers, Ab Liva and Sandman, in 2004 to drop We Got It 4 Cheap, and four mixtapes later, the group still delivers raw quality as its main ingredient. No skits, no guests -- just hard beats, unrelenting lyrics, and an almost fetishistic obsession with all aspects of cocaine packaging and distribution.
Pusha T remains, in my book, one of the top ten MCs working today, and brother Malice brings similar skills with vague hints of an emotional dark side that keeps things interesting. Ab Liva has presence and perhaps the most range of any Re-Up member. Unlike Sandman, he is actually allowed to kick the first verse on a few tracks. Sandman does his part though, making his mark not through his rapping (which is generally terrible), but through his trademark Chewbacca-like yell, which peppers the volume throughout the album and may rival Jada Kiss' asthmatic cough as the weirdest ad lib in rap.
Oddly, Sandman's status as the irrefutable weak link of the crew doesn't detract, but rather adds a needed sense of humor to the Saga (insofar as he is laughably bad). The Clipse, for all their talents, are a hard-faced, humorless combo. If you had to find a fault in their formula, it would be that stern consistency can be mundane. When Pusha spits, "Raising the bar, I'm Tiger below par," on We Got It 4 Cheap Vol. 3, you have to wonder if in rap, like golf, is it possible to be so predictably good that you begin to yearn for a renegade like John Daly or Weezy to roll through and shake things up?
On this disc, Pusha spits, "I only know two ways if living -- rap or unwrap," with such a dry candor that you get the feeling that he's not lying. But hey, the brothers have made cocaine into a topic as endlessly fertile as love was to the Romantics, so who can blame them?
Every track is pretty much as good as the last, but there are two standouts. "Stuntin Y'all" sees the crew firing on all cylinders over a funky bass line and some upbeat chimes. Even the hook is solid, which is not always a strongpoint of the group. Meanwhile, "N****z Know" is the album's one surprise and it's a pleasant one: Gil-Scott Heron's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" provides the backdrop and feels equally poignant twenty years after it was first released. Liva weaves in and out of Heron's spoken word, delivering introspective verses over a dark and moody beat.
Never content to cut its product with filler, Re-Up Gang delivers another album-quality mixtape. But if you haven't heard the We Got It 4 Cheap series, start there before shelling out for this volume, because frankly, it is not quite as good.
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