Kool G Rap: Greatest Hits : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

As KRS-One will tell anyone who asks, hip-hop was born in the Bronx. But the rival ciphers of Queens have produced much of New York's finest rap talent from the late Eighties through today. Credit goes to Marley Marl, the genre's first superproducer and a master of the chopped-and-looped soul sample. On the two volumes of In Control, from 1988 and 1991, respectively, Marley generously showcases countless local talents - Roxanne Shante, Big Daddy Kane, Craig G., Tragedy, Masta Ace and Biz Markie -- on energetic, raw tracks such as "The Symphony." Another of Marley Marl's finds was Kool G Rap, a lispy MC with dark, acute observations of hood minutiae. For the next generation of streetwise Queens storytellers -- Nas, Mobb Deep, Cormega - Kool G Rap was the blueprint, as on "Ill Street Blues" and the morose "Streets of New York," where he moans, "It gets tiring/The sight of a gun firing." Indeed.

JON CARAMANICA
(From RS 920, April 17, 2003)