Two leaders of New York's hardcore hip-hop scene make rugged and raw returns

Brooklyn's Black Moon and Queens' Mobb Deep are the Chihuahuas of hip-hop thuggism and rhyme: They're small, but you really don't want to fuck with them. The Moon's Buckshot and 5FT. and the Mobb's Prodigy and Havoc use the recording booth as an alchemist's laboratory, transforming themselves into towering bullies on the block, able to stare down bigger and heavier adversaries with arsenic-laced wordplay.

War Zone finds Black Moon (Buck, 5 and DJ Evil Dee) none the worse for wear from the whole megillah of internal and legal strife that followed 1993's seminal Enta da Stage. Buckshot uses center stage as a platform for talking shit to the police, commercial rappers and anyone else stupid enough to cross his path, employing his singsong to vertiginous effect over the winding East Indian feel of "This Is What It Sounds Like": "This is what it sounds like/When you're caught in a whirlwind," he says with enough plausibility to make you grab onto Toto for dear life. An MC's MC, he restructures poetic meters with panache on "One, Two": "Little Tasmanian/Black Damien/Purpose is to pull a plug/Shoot an enemy in the mug/Like what?/Buck never gave a fuck.

On Murda Muzik, Mobb Deep remain high lamas of a religion known as the Realness. "Allustrious" finds Prodigy coming down from the mountain guns-and-Moses-style, righteously letting loose on false idols and believers in those golden calves: "My spiral book/Holds the world's most lethal/There's no cure for what my pen do neither/Bring the fever/Y'all niggas is the rap jesters/While we was gone for a moment/Y'all kept the crowd going.

The production on both Muzik and War Zone remains cause for devotion among initiates and might even gain some converts. On Muzik, Havoc juxtaposes morose organ melodies with drums that thump like marching pachyderms, while Evil Dee and Da Beatminerz serve up backdrops of murky, marshy bass grooves and sublime instrumentation for War Zone. Maybe size doesn't matter. (RS 810)

KRIS EX

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(Posted: Apr 15, 1999)