Guilty Simpson, Ode To The Ghetto
Featured Album
Serial Dilla collaborator shines on his first solo LP.
Though they're best known for the string of abstract prog-rap classics they've released over the last several years, Stones Throw has also cultivated the careers of more than a few straight-talk, street-level rappers — the types of MCs that are less about bobbing and weaving their way through dense metaphors and unusual flows and more about coming right at you with no-nonsense rawness. Detroit's Guilty Simpson debuted as a guest on the Madlib/J. Dilla collaboration Champion Sound and made his mark as an unpolished diamond on “Strapped”; five years later his first full-length solo record Ode to the Ghetto delivers a similarly rough, sardonic and fierce experience over the course of 16 tracks. With a wide range of producers — siblings Madlib and Oh No, fellow Detroiters Mr. Porter (aka D12's Kon Artis) and Black Milk along with the requisite Dilla contribution — it's up to Simpson to grab hold of their disparate beats and tie the album together. He does so with a ragged bravado, spitting street knowledge that's less gunslinger fantasy and more bleak humor. He holds up pet stores in “Robbery,” glowers at profiling cops in “Pigs,” and simultaneously reps and laments his spot in the title track. Put on Ode expecting mindblowing complexity and you might be disappointed. It's not forced or ostentatious — it's just some good old-fashioned (and new-fashioned) headknock.
