Ghostface Killah: Bulletproof Wallets : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Within the wu-tang dynasty, Ghostface Killah has often seemed a little like a rhythm guitarist: underappreciated but totally essential. On his third solo album, the rapper stays true to the Wu school of classic soul samples, ultraviolence and rugged surrealism. Bulletproof Wallets is soaked in nostalgia and blood from the get-go, when Ghost kicks "Maxine," a booming, brassy tale of drugs and gruesome death in the projects, then segues into "Flowers," which is pulled taut over frozen disco strings. Elsewhere, Ghost yelps about Pippi Longstocking and Scrooge McDuck robbing and pimping in "The Forest," and gets off his best line, in "Ghost Showers": "I need Viacom money, but rhyming ain't enough." Yet it's Ghost's voice itself that keeps his music on the right side of the thin line between standard and sublime. As an instrument, his high holler doesn't just telegraph intimidation or roughness so much as desperation and powerlessness in the face of extreme danger. Bulletproof Wallets is riveting because even on "The Juks," when he's rhyming about getting paid, he comes off like a tough but fatally vulnerable anti-hero, forever trapped in the headlights of oncoming disaster.

PAT BLASHILL
(RS 883/884 - December 6, 2001)