Inspectah Deck — The Movement

Four years after debuting, Inspectah Deck releases his second LP, during the third wave of Wu-Tang releases. The production is mainly made by Phantom of the Beats and Ayatollah, authors of seven and six beats respectively, while Falling Down and Arabian Knight of Royal Fam each provide a rhythm. Guests are essential, Mojehan, the affiliate Street Life, Killarmy rapper Killa Sin and crime rap Legend, His Majesty the Untouchable Kool G Rap. The early 2000s are tough seasons for hip-hop, and even the best rap group ever suffers. The pole, for all of them, is now "Supreme Clientele", three years away.

Rebel INS has neither adequate production nor competent lyrics to arm itself on par with the Ghostface effort. Music is easy, it plays a lot on the economy, low boom bap, raw drums, scarcity of samples, and so on. This type of sound doesn't support Inspector Dek's hardcore style, which is often louder than the beats themselves. The record, through some of its most undisciplined sixteen tracks, seeks radio airplays, commercial success, female audiences, and the crowd that flocks to the club, drawing the condemnations of the few purists still faithful to the original sound of the Staten Island crew, that you may think you will find in this document in a different or watered-down form, but which is not really there.

Promoted as "the real debut" by the performer himself, it's soon disowned by the MC of Staten Island, due to its unfinished and strongly erratic nature. Loud Records struggles to promote Deck's '99 album, the rapper leaves the label and joins the independent Koch Records, whose sales results are significantly lower when compared with the other LP, to the detriment of a weak applause from music critics. Still, the album starts off very well, the first song is a pearl of Inspectah Deck, one of his best offers, "City High": Haas G of UMC's aka Phantom of the Beats shows he has a good ear and draws a soul sample from the rnb group Soul Survivor ode to their hometown, "City of Brotherly Love". The Phantom gives it a chipmunk twist and lays a sublime musical carpet for Rollie Fingers' velvety, energetic and captivating flow, making an anthem with a sound that has its roots in the Wu-Tang discography, being rediscovered by Jay-Z at the turn of the century and popularized by Kanye West in the following years.

Cookin Soul modernized the song in his own remix a few years later. No rhythm sounds so good on the rest of the album. Streetlife is discreet in its cut, while fellow guests Kool G Rap and Killa Sin make "Framed" worthy of a couple of spins, one of the CD's highlights. The rest disappoints, and the concluding section travels between decent and forgettable songs. Among the many, "Vendetta" stands out, which finds, with the producer Ayatollah, that soulish sound that this record didn't have the will to deepen, unfortunately: boom bap is good, there's a competent choice of samples, a good dusty downtempo drum, and the MC's lively fluid rapping goes better than usual. These are a few moments, short and too distant from each other to save the album: they fight stubbornly like pockets of resistance against an army of invisible evil mediocrity that awaits an inevitable surrender. 5.7/10.