With 'Shorty the Pimp,' Oakland's Too $hort drops another bomb in the gender war. The album is a female-hating string of songs pulsing with $hort's usual blend of nonchalance, heavy bass lines and disdainful lyrics. His rhymes (especially on "Step Daddy" and "Hoochie") flow so effortlessly, and $hort's delivery is so laid-back and listless, you'd think he was rhyming by accident if it weren't for the calculated coldness of his words.

$hort offers lessons to his listeners in how to be a cool-ass pimp ("I Ain't Nothin' but a Dog") as well as how to be a multiplatinum artist. The one radio-safe single on Shorty the Pimp, "I Want to Be Free (That's the Truth)," aside from having a smoothly deadpan, ultra-quotable last line – "I ain't mad/I'm just black" – is cogent and true and pops with isolated finger snaps, real drums and a plaintive, perfectly used sample from the Ohio Players. Too $hort and promising new producer Ant Banks make their big-at-the-bottom musical point well, but $hort's superiority-over-women complex sounds either too forced or too real. Either way, it's heart freezing.

Stuffed to busting with lines about sluts and girls riding on $hort's "snoopy," this collection is punctuated with colorful words about what to do when your bitch is acting up (throw her "In the Trunk") and play-by-plays of the sex sessions of $hort's "persona." The album is a byproduct of his angry, warranted nightmares (the police) and his angry wet dreams (the bitches). But for all its deftly drawn urban male realities, Shorty the Pimp lacks the immediacy necessary to make its he-man poetry jolting. $hort's songs momentarily empower the disfranchised Young Black Male and the fascinated Young White Male but move any self-respecting female to press eject – firmly.

Shorty the Pimp – like Born to Mack, Life Is ... Too Short, Short Dog's in the House and all the freaky tales $hort put on blank cassette when he was in high school – is about being a black adolescent in east Oakland, about his dick and about the same story (how he made it big) he's been telling since forever. Too $hort's cult will be far from disappointed. But his misogyny, which used to be bewildering, more taunting than challenging, has gone from insulting to scary. (RS 639)

DANYEL SMITH