Paris — The Devil Made Me Do It

Oscar "Paris" Jackson Jr. at the time was a twenty-year-old with an above-average culture, a charismatic leader who wanted to fight the oppression of blacks in America with boundless political anger and the intent to want to unleash a revolution. In 1989, the San Francisco artist founded his own independent label, Scarface Records, and releases his debut single "Scarface Groove". In 1990, Paris publishes his first LP, self-produced, with no guest.

Singular rapper, he's among the most talented in his field, he's more militant than Afrocentric, he performs over an hour of mainly political subjects: he's equipped with a skillful vocabulary that allows him to spit out tight rhymes revolted in excellent schemes of rhymes delivered with firmness and thoughtful anger, a lot of anger, which compensates for a serious flow and not among the best in the game, in an excellent style of sharp and offensive rapping, powerful, hardcore that gives relevance to social tensions, violence against blacks and to fill the social gap between races, bringing a message of black unity.

The production is made by Paris himself: the sound is raw, skeletal, tight and dark, a powerful and hardcore boom bap that presents rare variations, political and hard samples, tough basses, dry and regular drum machines and threatening scratches. This effort inspired by Public Enemy is a hard and dark listening, lucid cold, provocative and even compelling in its social denunciation and demonization of the white devil, from which tense and threatening tracks emerge, so controversial as to be censored by MTV (which has easy censorship, actually): its themes pro-black incite its people to react, the title track is louder than a bomb.

Released by Scarface Records and distributed by Tommy Boy, the disk is praised by critics and welcomed positively by crowds, entering the Billboard 200 and the top 50 among rap records, selling over 300,000 physical copies according Paris. Overall, it's a mature, coherent, powerful, enthralling and free of weaknesses work, Paris puts all the passion possible into this album: a document-authority in its subgenre comes out, an attack against the system and its corrupt and perverted nature, this record represents hip-hop culture.

Highlights: "Scarface Groove", "Ebony", "The Devil Made Me Do It", "Mellow Madness".

Rating: 8/10.