He's "the abominable ho-man", but a few women might call him worse things. That's Ludacris, the relentlessly saucy rapper from Atlanta and hip-hop's equivalent of a blue turn at the local working men's club.
Superficially, Cris' second album is a good-natured selection of shag-centric party tunes, a far cry from the gangsta posturing that usually upsets moral guardians. A brief skit at the start of 'Growing Pains' places him in his natural environment, the playground, trading falsetto insults like, "Your momma's so old, she used to gangbang with the Hebrews". Recent hit 'Area Codes' peppers its nagging g-funk riff with a load of terrible puns involving the word "ho", and features Ludacris fantasising about "bang cock in Bangkok".
'Word Of Mouf', then, is not exactly the most sophisticated rap album of the year. Since the album opens with the line, "The royal penis is clean, your highness," and a song celebrating the 'genius' of Eddie Murphy's Coming To America, we're hardly in the cultured realm of Ludacris' Atlantan contemporaries Outkast (their Dungeon Family posse album is a much better way to spend your money, incidentally). Ludacris is more of a southern Busta Rhymes minus the paranoia, an obvious contemporary of Nelly's good-time party music. Indeed, the stand-out track here, 'Rollout (My Business)' features a chanted chorus in the Nelly style, whilst Timbaland shapes a (relatively crude, by his standards) hybrid of Latino horns and electro stabs.
All well and relatively innocuous. The problem with 'Word Of Mouf' is that, too often, so much of Ludacris' randy chat slides into casual and ugly misogyny. Discovering a dubious attitude to women on a rap record isn't really front page news, of course. But what's distracting here is the remorseless focus, and the way violent sexism is constantly passed over as humour. So while fine producers like Swizz Beatz ('Cry Babies (Oh No)') and Organized Noise ('She Said') provide excellent beats, Ludacris is too busy abusing girls who won't suck his dick to notice. He's a good rapper and, after a cold shower, quite funny - "I smoke so much broccoli," he observes, interestingly. You'd have hoped Missy Elliott laying down the law to him on 'One Minute Man' might have taught him better manners, though.
