A native of the Bronx, raised on Long Island, Craig Mack became passionate about hip-hop in his teens and began writing and recording songs, including "Just Rhymin' / Get Retarded" (1988), made with Diamond J under the moniker MC EZ & Troup, mixed by Charlie Marotta and released with Fresh Records, the label that launched EPMD.
Mack approaches the duo and goes on tour with them, temporarily holding back his rapping career. The boy returns to have a good chance at the end of '93, when the A&R of Uptown Records, Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs is fired: Puff Daddy decides to found his own label, and brings with him The Notorious B.I.G., which he has signed with Uptown a few weeks ago. Craig Mack signs with Bad Boy Entertainment, becoming the first artist to release anything with the label: in the summer of 1994 his first solo single, "Flava in Ya Ear", is released, in view of the upcoming studio album.
In the following fall, Craig Mack debuts his first LP, the second in the label's history, one week ahead of Notorious B.I.G.'s "Ready to Die", which overshadows him forever. With no guests, the tape features a production split between Mack himself and Easy Mo Bee, while Lenny "Ace" Marrow and Rashad Smith create some rhythms: the soundscapes provided by these guys are just decent, generic and effortless funky boom bap with hard, thumping, syncopated drums, sometimes midtempo, and decent samples that pay homage to various East Coast artists among which, of course, Erick Sermon & Parrish Smith. Craig Mack's rapping is slow, syncopated and light-hearted, decent and almost abstract, he doesn't bring many arguments to the table, struggling to close the tracks and cutting out only one banger out of eleven.
"Flava in Ya Ear" is the career highlight of an MC who seems like the typical one-hit wonder, nevertheless, it's not exactly "good": Easy Mo Bee's mediocre boom bap, which on this album is as if he used the rhythms discarded from the "Ready to Die" sessions — it's impossible to stay away from Biggie's CD when dealing with Mack's — on which he places a slow syncopated bouncy drum machine and poor samples, the MC delivers worthily, but the song doesn't stand out qualitatively from the others on an irregular and bland 49-minute East Coast effort.
Distributed by Arista and Bad Boy Entertainment, the album is very-well promoted: "Flava in Ya Ear" is a great success, coming in first place among the rap singles and in the top ten among the Hot 100, favored by a remix with Biggie Smalls, Busta Rhymes, LL Cool J and Rampage, and being certified platinum at the end of the year. In addition, the second single on the album, "Get Down", also flies in the charts and is certified gold the following year. The album approaches the top 20 in the pop chart and the top 5 in the rap chart, becoming one of the best-selling rap records in the period 1994-1995, certified gold and being positively received by critics: nevertheless, it's heavily overshadowed by the other album, and in subsequent years, Mack fails to recreate further hit singles, being released by Bad Boy.
Rating: 6/10.
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