eMusic Review 0
Erick Sermon's legacy is primarily as EPMD's Green-Eyed Bandit of hard funk. But we can thank him for Newark's anarchic weedhead, Redman, too. The erstwhile Reggie Noble's debut is utterly uncompromising East Coast funk-rap, each song threaded with three or four samples at a time — a style of beat-making that's mostly a relic of the early '90s. But Sermon and Red, who share production duties, are as deft with it as any of their contemporaries. Still, this album is about the arrival of a boisterous, incorrigible personality. Red is simultaneously a goofball and a menace — one of hip-hop's most unique blends of the threatening and the harmless. On the Cypress Hill-lifting "Time 4 Sum Aksion" he is a rampaging hooligan. Later, on the butter-soft "Tonight's Da Night," he elegantly curves around an Isaac Hayes horn line. But mostly, he is a lackadaisical, hilariously single-minded stoner. Red would grow as a conceptual artist in the future, but he'd never be as charmingly sui generis as on his debut.
