Kurupt of Dogg Pound fame assaults your ears with
his new album Space Boogie: Smoke
Oddessey. The album contains the likes of Dogg Pound alumni – Snoop
Dogg, Nate Dogg and Daz Dillenger; as well as Xzibit, Everlast, and Fred Durst.
The West Coast rhyme warrior and Dogg
Pound gangsta Kurupt takes a
step toward debunking one of hip-hop’s myths: that smoking weed is sinister and
aggressive. The music is loose and liquid – the trippy, aired-out grooves feel
like G-funk at zero gravity – and Kurupt
name-checks both the mind-expansion theories of Timothy Leary and the healing-of-the-nations stances of Bob Marley. Blast Off muses on taking blacks to a planet that will affect their vibrations, for the better, of
course; It’s Over challenges
other MC’s to concede being in the game; the Everlast-assisted Kuruption
paints world government as a robotic, Borglike entity. The album isn’t all escapism
and big-picture ruminations, though. The hallmarks of gangsta shit abound,
including copious servings of chest beating (The Hardest Mutha Fuckas), bitch-ass nigga threatening (On, Onsite, Gangsta’s) and ho bashing (sprinkled in just about every verse). In
Kurupt‘s world, the truth is out
there somewhere, but gangstas, bitches and ho’s are still around the corner.
What this all boils down to is a bass heavin’, West Coast lovin’, Dogg Pound sounding album. All the
guests are present, the sound is similar, and the themes are the same. If you’re
in the dogghouse, you’re loving this album.