Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson recently told a publication that "history is the one thing that hip-hop audiences have utter contempt for."
Mash Out Posse are clearly counting on this sentiment to hold true, lest some MTV shorties call them out for biting
Ice-T's steez à la
Body Count. Heck, most of these kids probably won't even remember
Limp Bizkit's melding of metal and rap, which puts
MOP in a pretty strong position with these hard rock reworkings of classic tracks and some originals that don't do much lyrically past Lil' Fame and Billy Danzenie's well-established tough-guy party boasts and whose riffs barely cross into the '90s, let alone the current millennium. And it goes from ill-advised to pure catastrophe on "Fire," which climbs to the heights of metal ridicule with a falsetto chorus and sick-cat screeches by the supposed "street poets" at work here. At least
the Posse are stand-up enough to subtitle "Hilltop Flava" "No Sleep 'Til Brooklyn," which is where the song parrots its riff and chorus. But rappers paying tribute to rappers who paid tribute to metal is just too convoluted to be considered the next step after
Run-D.M.C. did
Aerosmith's "Walk This Way." Especially in this post-Puffy "why even bother to write your own song when there were so many in the '80s to bite" world. [The album was also released in a clean version.] ~ Joshua Glazer