After the release of "Let’s Get It Started", MC Hammer signs with Capitol Records and begins a huge tour to support his disk. Between May 1988 and November 1989, during the tour, he records his third effort, practically on the streets, whenever the MC had some spare time to make tracks on the back of his tour bus.
The overall cost of recording the entire LP is close to just ten thousand dollars, almost the same of his independent debut album. The Hammer tour consists of a large cast that includes over a hundred performers who accompany him on the dates and in the summer of 1989, "Let's Get It Started" is certified platinum. Despite the great success of his second LP, Hammer choose to turn into the pop rap. The production is handled by Hammer, Big Louis Burrell, Felton Pilate and James Earley. There's no guest. Six singles are extracted, but the disk is leaded by one only, "U Can't Touch This". Timeless classic.
On one of the most catchy pop dance rhythms you can ever listen to, MC Hammer stole the riff from Rick James' "Super Freak" and brings out a particularly stupid text in which he claims to be popular, to have skills on the mic with which the rapper creates rhymes and beats "that you cannot touch". The music video of the song created to promote the single ends up blessing him: Hammer goes wild with some of his idiotic dances and the video gets the awards for best rap video and best video dance at the MTV Video Music Award, losing in the category for best male video, best editing and best choreography.
It's considered among the best rap videos in history. First rap cut candidate for record of the year in 1990, the banger wins two Grammys as Best R&B Song and Best Rap Solo Performance (newborn category), and is later used in all types of media, an infinite number of films, shows, commercials and video games, especially in comic moments, ending up being parodied both in the Family Guy (by Peter) and in several episodes of the Simpsons, where Bart records "Can't Touch Me" under the supervision of MC Hammer himself, Homer patrols with one of his rap megaphones when the boys recognize Hammer in him and start following him dancing, and in the anthemic "Behind the Laughter", which mentions the episode of "Behind the Music" that interested MC Hammer and makes numerous references to him. It's not enough, because the rapper himself will have his own cartoon ("Hammerman").
Despite the hit, soon became his signature song, "Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em" is one of the worst albums in the history of that genre that you can ascribe as pop rap. Probably even in the immense rap genre it's one of the worst records. When rap music is providing one of its best and brightest expressions ever, Hammer comes out with a filthy garbage that overwhelms everything else with sales and makes the whole thing much more annoying. MC Hammer has been a pop / dance rap artist since day zero, but this album is one of the most crossover products of its time, Hammer tries to throw himself into every theme, from gangsters to religious gospel, passing through the preacher and the socio-conscious, and it always makes you laugh: he mixes braggadocio, street socio-conscious, parties, black pride, girls and pop stuff in a tasteless and greyish dish that he doesn't like either, but that the public will enjoy and love. For its almost entire totality, it's trashy material for no one, you can't save anything here, and almost all annoying: it's fun and bad at the same time, the first real example of trash rap.
His production isn't only unoriginal for being pop rap, it presents slow and clumsy, simplistic, cheap and weak rhythms, a bad confused mix of funk and danceable disco sound that flows into hip house, new jack and pop dance. It's an inaccessible music, and so far, there's nothing wrong with the rest of the rap or pop game. But, it's also an unacceptable production: the samples he chooses are trivial and simple, stolen without too much effort from soul and funk hits of the recent past (Chi-Lites, James Brown, Jackson 5, Prince, Earth, Wind & Fire, Barry White, Rick James and Marvin Gaye), and almost every track is based on the original hooks, he doesn't even fix them, he doesn't touch them. Precisely for one of these, not surprisingly that of the super hit "U Can't Touch This", Rick James presents a lawsuit for copyright infringement and Hammer decides to resolve it out of court by agreeing to credit Rick James and Alonzo Miller as authors of his hit, giving him the millions he owed them in royalties after appropriating the guitar riff that opens the Rick James song and is repeated in this banger.
Leaving both the music and the lyrics aside, the disc is chock full of, you can't even define commercial errors or commercial oversights, they're atomic holes such as pop dance lame hooks, bad and irritating, rhyming patterns that I don't think exist (just, literally: "A-A-B-B-C-C" or "A-A-B-B-C-D-E-E"), indecent deliveries, a style of bad, syncopated, rigid, clumsy flows and background singers both male and female who are as bad as Hammer. His rapping style is fantastic, for a 1983 album. But being a 1990 album, it doesn't make sense to perform like this: he's too rough and basic, he doesn't seem to have a flow. More than rapping, Hammer sings, screams and speaks all the time, dropping monotonous lyrics that go beyond the simplistic and building slack and horrible songs even when he tries to make the hit again, without succeeding. In one of the last pieces of the disc, it seems that on the hook he says "wack is wack", at which point you think "at least he admits it!". His state of mind oriented towards pure and evil pop is annoying and attracts criticism from the whole circuit, in addition to those of specialized reviewers.
Despite the very poor quality of the musical offering and everything else, the numbers prove him right. Capitol promotes the effort with shrewd and profitable marketing moves, and gets a response from the audience simply never seen before in rap. Fourth months after the release, the album becomes the first to reach the number one spot on Billboard 200, remaining at the top for 21 weeks, 53 in the top ten, 108 in the chart. It spent 68 weeks on the R&B chart, 29 at number one, 16 of which were consecutive. The singles chosen all get considerable airplay on television and radio, a particular case being the hit "U Can't Touch This" which is released in such a particular format that most fans are practically forced to buy the entire album to listen to it: this choice penalizes the sales results of the single, which stops just inside the top ten in the singles chart, but ends up rewarding the album sales which skyrocket.
By the summer, the album was selling over one hundred thousand physical copies a day and in less than six months after its release it surpassed "Licensed to Ill" by Beastie Boys and became the best-selling rap album ever, reaching four million copies. In January 1991, it was at eight million, no one had sold so much since Prince with his "Purple Rain" (1984), but the album didn't stop and by the following summer it was already certified diamond by the RIAA for over ten million certified physical copies, which rose to seventeen worldwide. It helps to bring pop rap to a new level of popularity, so much so that in 1989 the Billboard named Hammer the best rap artist of the year. The album was one of the best-selling albums of the 1990s, earning certifications on four continents and catapulting the young, multi-millionaire Hammer into legend.
Rating: 2/10.
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