Rap is obsessed with authenticity. Yet the advent of stars like 50 Cent, whose status as shooting victim is deemed to underscore the "reality" of his lyrics, has helped move the genre away from its initial prioritising of lyrical and vocal skills. Enter Westside Connection – veteran LA rappers Mack 10, Coolio's one-time mentor WC and rapper-turned-actor-turned-movie director Ice Cube – who are here to take gangsta rap, a sub-genre one would have thought too nihilist to provoke nostalgia, back to its roots.
"Terrorist Threats" posits Cube, WC and Mack 10 as the gangsta equivalents of Sweet Dick Willie and his friends, sitting on the corner opposite Sal's Pizzeria in the Spike Lee movie Do The Right Thing. Quick-witted, foul-mouthed curmudgeons, they find fault with everything new and call for a return to the good old days, when gangsta emcees were tough, beats were muscular, and rappers only got shot in songs.
This is a record that stresses its ignorance and lack of formal innovation as core virtues, turning a deliberate, even belligerent refusal to move with the times into a selling point. "My style is ancient," Cube brags on the opening track, "Call 9-1-1", "I come with that language – it's mad, it's brainless." References to al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are abundant, often deployed with a deliberate ineptitude so exaggerated it becomes hilarious. In the title track WC angrily protests that "I ain't from the Taliban, I'm from the Niggaban", while during "Gangsta Nation" Mack 10 raps, "Evacuate the building, here comes a plane".
Yet among the deliberate provocation and delicious puerility there's plenty of substance. The best track, "Potential Victim", finds each rapper delivering a stinging and perfectly sculpted set of often politically astute four-line verses, set to music that matches a retro feel with discomfiting dissonance and metallic clamour. "Call 9-1-1" criticises rappers who turned from police-bashing to patriotism after September 11th, and in "You Gotta Have Heart" Cube notes that "If I was white and called my mama a bitch/It wouldn't have taken me this long to get this rich". Less a jab at Eminem, as it's been reductively interpreted, the couplet is simply a statement of fact.
The closing track, "Superstar (Double Murder = Double Platinum)", brings things full circle, the threesome arguing that rap skills are more important when making records than a criminal CV. They're right, and they know it: and in the process of pointing it out, they've made the first genuinely entertaining gangsta rap album in years.
