Master P's trademark uunngh! is infectious and irritating, original and ancient, a post-lingual wail, a lame imitation of a lame sea gull and the sound of a dying man's soul slipping out of his lungs. And a brilliant minimalist gesture: When P tires of saying "Feel my pain," he just opens up and makes you feel it.

New Orleans' P is a master at communicating, the latest in a tradition of rappers – which includes Tupac and Scarface – who are short on MC skills but are geniuses at making themselves felt. Like Jay-Z and the late Notorious B.I.G., P represents the heart-having, conscience-racked but superdetermined street dealer – the sensitive hustler, the "Inside I'm crying" slanger. He cries uunngh! for those already gone, for his war wounds, for his fatherless black self trapped in this white world. Saying that P can't rap is about as right as saying that Satchmo couldn't sing, Basquiat couldn't paint or Tupac couldn't flow. What they lacked in traditional skills was more than made up for in attitude and a connection with the audience so strong it was like cable. P may never actually flow, but you will feel him.

And, like Bill Gates, you will pay him. At P's label, No Limit Records, they put 'em out as fast as their art department can design those covers. Whether you pick up Soulja Slim's Give It 2 'Em Raw or Fiend's There's One in Every Family or C-Murder's Life or Death, you're guaranteed to get twenty or so nuanceless songs drenched in the No Limit sound – a mix of West Coast G-funk, New Orleans bounce and Luke's Miami bass. It's that funeral funk: A gumbo of some 808 drum machines, some ominous notes, some gangster rhymes and P's wails, it all comes off like a soundtrack for a slightly campy Scream-era horror movie, and (except for the R&B outfit Sons of Funk's The Game of Funk) it all works perfectly as psych-up music for that testosterone-filled ride to the strip club, the weight room or the ball court.

Surfing them beats – sometimes on the beat, sometimes not – are those irrepressible No Limit soldiers: the aforementioned, as well as Silkk the Shocker, Kane and Abel, and the Full Metal Jacket sergeant turned MC, Mystikal ("I ain't the same old, same ordinary, everyday rap/Bitch, I killed Kenny/So I guess I'm that bastard"). There's also the lovely and unstoppable Mia X ("I'm the index finger on the trigger – don't move!/Whoops!/Saw ya blink ya eyes/Now you gon' make the news"). No serious hip-hop crew is complete without a woman who is (quietly) better than most of the guys.

Snoop Doggy Dogg, just recently paroled from Death Row Records and now signed to No Limit, pops up here and there throughout the catalog, with six new rhymes on P's album MP da Last Don and a song on the soundtrack for P's film I Got the Hook-Up! (Despite a slew of high-profile guests, Hook-Up! is forgettable except for Ice Cube's harrowing "Ghetto Vet," the first-person tale of a banger who ends up paralyzed – "Now, whoever thought a nigga rude as Ice Cube/[Would] be pissin' through a tube." It's as deep as anything Cube has ever done.) The sound of Snoop claiming No Limit is no shocker – his hustler rhymes and Southern drawl let him fit right in, and, besides, the hip-hop generation is used to reconstituted families. But he does sound a bit out of place – Snoop without Dre is Scottie Pippen without Michael Jordan – and his sleek, high-tech vocal style clashes with that of his grunting, growling No Limit brethren, a glittering Lamborghini in a sea of mudsplattered Jeep Wranglers. Still, after years at the Vietnam that was Death Row, I'm just glad he's alive.

Where Snoop is a surgeon-precise MC, P is as delicate as Shaq, so raw he's anti-technique. On what he's calling his final solo platter, MP da Last Don, P pulls in stars from the West Coast to the South Coast – Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, E-40, Texas' UGK – and, conspicuously, not one guest from the East Coast establishment. He comes with cuckoo-for-capitalism records ("Get Your Paper"), world-weary political sermons ("Dear Mr. President" and "Black and White") and brilliantly hectic No Limit anthems ("Make 'Em Say Uhh #2" and "Hot Boys and Girls"). He tells it plain: "And [I] still run with the thug niggas/And make tapes for bitches and drug dealers/And push 600 with the bulletproof/The ghetto Bill Gates/The only president with a gold tooth." And he comes from deep within the Tupac Shakur school of MC'ing – note the gritty sound; the way he extends his last words and puts echo effects on his voice; the relentless energy; the, how shall we say, unusual approach to rhythm; and, mostly, the way he manages, despite being a limited MC, to be a powerful communicator. Is it a surprise that both Tupac and P began in Oakland in the early Nineties?

The surprise is how much P's music sounds like some old-school hip-hop. Those boast-rhymes delivered loud and wild, that raw, homemade tinge of the funeral funk, the absence of references to any murderous rap feud – MP da Last Don recalls what the West Coast made in the mid-Eighties, the early Ice-T, Too $hort and Mix-a-Lot era. With some relatively tame gun and drug talk thrown in. So if New York and Los Angeles are hip-hop superpowers putting a Cold War behind them, then N'Awlins is Switzerland – a refuge from all that, a free place – and Master P is a throwback to a time when niggas got paid sellin' tapes out they trunks, rap stars didn't die, and life, in hip-hop, was simple. (RS 789)

TOURÉ