Debut studio album by Ivan Alonzo Newton aka Mr. Ivan, rapper from New Orleans, Louisiana. The album is recorded in the studio of Mannie Fresh, who handles production and mixing and is the main host. Shawn "Tha Devil" is credited on guitar. Other guests include Cash Money roster members Lil $lim, Kilo-G, Tec-9 of UNLV, Black, Big Heavy of PxMxWx (aka Projects' Most Wanted) and the co-founder of that label B-32 better known by the stage name Birdman.
These fifty minutes abound with g-funk beats and rough gangsta bars both derived from the West Coast with which the New Orleans rapper is comfortable. For a few years, Mr. Ivan made a name for himself by make concerts wearing a hockey mask, only to change his image after signing with Bang'n Records.
The cover is among the simplest in hip-hop and tells you everything you need to know, that is, the few essential and fundamental notions to learn before going to listen to it: author's name at the top with such an excessive font and size that you can see them from the nearby city (to which two, not one but actually two exclamation points are added to support the fact that you are not going to buy and listen to an album taken at random from the bargain bin, but precisely that of one of the very first guys to sign for what over the following years and decades would become one of the most famous and important labels on the scene), title at the bottom with the same font but with a different size whose letters are no longer distinguishable from each other, image at the center of the scene, where the author, remaining as faithful as possible to his title, he's actually committing murder (this is the meaning of "187" in the California penal code, which takes up the title; the year before Spice 1 sold half a million copies by putting the code in the title of his disk and helping to spread the term beyond the borders of the Golden State) wearing a hockey mask in a drive-by.
The cover is therefore telling you that it is a gangsta rap album, a hardcore effort and also holds true to the original Cash Money label tradition of at least someone having a firearm in their hands or miming the gun gesture with their fingers, possibly in your direction. It reminds me in some ways of some of those mafia films directed by Fernando Di Leo. It doesn't excel, there's nothing really bad about it and you already know what to expect. This rapper's debut might appeal to fans of gangsta rap, g-funk and mobb music from the Bay Area, other listeners might even pass by. 6/10.
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