Third solo album by Robert Diggs, founder of the Wu-Tang Clan: Diggs abandons the moniker Bobby Digital and releases the album under the name RZA, for the first time in his career. The record is almost entirely produced by himself, however, The Abbot occasionally leaves the keyboards to other beatmakers: Choco, Megahertz, Barracuda, and the "Wu-Elements" Tru Masta & Bronze Nazareth. The guests of the album are Ol' Dirty Bastard, Masta Killa and Ghostface Killah of Wu-Tang Clan, Beretta 9 of Killarmy, Prodigal Sunn of Sunz of Man, Freemurda & Shacronz of CCF Division, the affiliates Allah Real, Cilvaringz, Tash Mahogany, Featherz, and the only external guest of the edition, the German singer Xavier Naldoo.
RZA opens the disc with "Bob N' I", with a female soul sample left to breathe from a classic, "Feeling Good" by Freda Payne, telling fans that this is a new beginning for him. But it's not. Dry, hard and pounding midtempo drum, light jazzy boom bap, jamesbondian rhythm; then, Choco switches beats and offers a mediocre boom bap with an annoying sample, on which RZA decides to spit bars with a raw and quick style. Beretta 9 is the first guest on the tape: decent beat made by Bobby Digital, boom bap with annoying sample, raw and bad syncopated delivery by Bobby Steels, who's gifted with poor rapping; the rapper of Killarmy goes better. "We Pop" is a posse with Ol' Dirty Bastard and CCF Division rappers Free Murder and Shacronz: Megahertz almost decent hopping boom bap, slow squeeze drum machine, hard and pounding, ridiculous video-game sample. On this poor musical carpet, RZA provides rough and smooth fast syncopated delivery, lousy banal hook, close Shacronz and Freemurda with slow, raw, generic rapping style. Intro and outro by Tash Mahogany, uncredited, the contribution of ODB isn't very clear to me, it seems to be on the hook with the guys from the CCF. Poor cut anyway.
Track number four features a light rhythm, the second created by RZA, with a fantastic light midtempo drum and Allah Real hook singing in the background. Boom bap practically perfect, let it breathe, then RZA, for once in his solo career he comes in with a decent style, calm, syncopated, slow, quiet, always rough, but with an almost spoken, accessible rapping. So, Masta Killa spits bars with a style similar to Bobby's, slow and calm, practically spoken: I thought it might be a better cut than that, instead it's just decent. In "Fast Cars", Ghostface Killah is called upon to save the entire album: mediocre boom bap by Tru Masta, ridiculous sample, cheap drum, mundane grueling hook performed by RZA and Erica Bryant (uncredited), rough and mean slow syncopated delivery of an uninspired Abbot. Ghostface breaks the beat with a lively, energetic, quick, deadly, dope delivery style. But he can't save the whole project. The sixth choice is a posse, this is what the tracklist tells us: Barracuda jazzy production, mediocre rhythm, with good sample, slow and poor economic drum machine, the main performer produces two stanzas with a slow, rough and almost decent style, then the joint is closed by Beretta 9, decent. Cilvaringz offers a couple of lines in the outro, while Featherz repeats three words in the hook with RZA.
Cilvaringz remains for "You'll Never Know", Bobby Digital's syncopated rhythm, slow, skeletal and poor drum, with an annoying sample that makes the song unlistenable: the boy produces the first of a long series of shoddy boom baps. He delivers slow, inspired and hardcore, never impressing, while Cilvaringz on the second verse is just decent and feels like a bad imitation of RZA himself. Track number eight is a rare solo from the founder of Wu-Tang: mediocre production, cheap and tight drum, rough and poor slow delivery of the interpreter, here at his worst. Fortunately, the guests return after three minutes. Prodigal Sunn has already saved his track on Bobby Digital's previous solo record while all the other performers were asleep, here he's called to the same task. Light boom bap, sluggish slow syncopated drum, ridiculous sample and practically non-existent mixing: Steels' slow and crude syncopated delivery is completely overwhelmed by the rhythm. Sunz of Man's MC takes care of the second verse, delivered with an energetic, hardcore, flowing, fluid and inspired style, again saves his track in one of the best performances on the CD. RZA lame hook, then closes Masta Killa, with slow, syncopated, decent style, they're both inferior to P Sunn.
The record collapses soon after: Diggs bad musical carpet, poor and cheap drum machine, horrible snare drum and annoying sample, this production is among the worst on the record. Daddy-O of Stetsasonic intro, uncredited, Shacronz's mediocre slow syncopated delivery, Freemurda's lame hook and porn inserts. The piece is closed by a slow and mediocre, raw delivery of RZA. "Wharever I Go" is another posse together with the rappers of CCF Division: jazzy boom bap, light midtempo drum, great light sample, decent-weak smooth slow syncopated delivery by Shacronz, Bobby Digital spits bars with slow and decent style. Change of beat in the finale, Freemurda's slow spoken syncopated delivery before Daddy-O's outro. Ruler Zig-Zag-Zig Allah opens "Koto Chotan", with an inspired style, fluid, rough, decent, on decent production, with lean syncopated drum and honest sample, then Tash Mahogany provides a verse in rapping, fluid, slow, hardcore; finally, Masta Killa closes, slow, decent, syncopated, discreet track.
The next one features one of the best beats of the edition and, obviously, it's not the work of Bobby Digital: behind the keyboards there's Bronze Nazareth. Boom bap, hard dry drum machine, thumping and midtempo, bad and cheap chipmunk soul sample, almost annoying, luckily it only appears every now and then, replaced by a flute sample. There's also a sample from Gladys Knight's "The Way We Were" on the hook, RZA delivers a slow, smooth, syncopated hardcore inspired delivery in one of his best solo tracks ever. Track number 14 is one of Bobby Steels' latest beats: his production is just plain bad, thin and tight drum, some decent jazzy samples in the background, topped by a deeply annoying sample. Rzarector delivers slow and syncopated, mediocre, there's a banal hook, then Beretta 9 spits bars with a syncopated and slow, generic style, he doesn't save the piece, before Xavier Naldoo's final sung hook. "The Birth" opens with an intro by Daddy-O with Prince Rakeem on the rhythm of Bronze Nazareth, jazzy boom bap with female melodic sample and slow lean and cheap drum, the rapper offers bars with a slow and rough syncopated style, there's also an almost decent bridge. Choice number sixteen closes the whole LP, production and rapping by The Abbot, single verse: elegant piano, female soulful sample, splendid, the first seconds are perfect. Yes, 30 perfect seconds, on this record, then comes the rapper: he delivers in a syncopated, slow, rough, cumbersome, clumsy and bad way, he's not inspired on an almost decent drum, dry and hard, raw and rough, incessant, not good.
Distributed by Sanctuary, a subsidiary of BMG, the record is a commercial flop (top 50 on the Billboard 200, #20 on the rap chart) and even music critics find that the album is one of the worst products to come out this season. Compared to his previous effort, Bobby Steels reduces the number of tracks and the time to 16 cuts and about an hour of listening. Robert Diggs abandons his negatively-critical character Bobby Digital, an alter-ego created in 1998 in order to sell as many records as possible, soon killed by fans and critics with a decent ear: in particular, the sales of his solo records such as Bobby Digital are a commercial failure, and he's surpassed by basically all other Wu-Tang members who aren't called U-God, being matched by the under-promoted debuts of Inspectah Deck and Cappadonna, and also approached by major Wu-affiliates. He then decides to publish cheap material under the name RZA, for the first time in his career: much to everyone's surprise, he sucks worse than before.
The production, mainly made by RZA, is among his worst ever: it's all a random and senseless mix of cheap, scarce and meager noises, heavy, pounding and unlivable drums, loud and bad samples. This sonic chaos is exhausting, and during the last listen I had to stop several times due to the heavy headache that forbade me to go on. The lyrics proposed by the performers are above all braggadocio and battle rap, shoddy and insipid, ridiculous and boring: the lead rapper, Diggs himself, is blatantly uninspired all the time and spits out random things, mumbling and shouting in bad rapping style worthy of the Wu-Tang Clan's poorest performer. The Abbot could get any guest, instead, he turns to Wu-universe artists again, failing again: the main guests of the edition are Masta Killa of Wu-Tang Clan, Beretta 9 of Killarmy, Daddy-O of Stetsasonic (friend of Diggs) and the brothers Freemurda and Shacronz of CCF Division, all with three spots each, while the mentor of the Allah Real group is present on a couple of tracks. These guys add very little to the cuts and can't pull the album out of a ditch made of muddy mediocrity, even the hooks on this LP are among the worst of Wu records. The part of Ghostface Killah in "Fast Cars" and that one of Prodigal Sunn in "The Whistle" are the best contributions of the project. Diggs continues to disappoint, first as Bobby Digital now as RZA, making a bad record that manages to be worse than its previous one, erratic, cumbersome, mired in mud, confused and chaotic, horrible. It doesn't even deserve justifications.
Rating: 4/10.
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