Lil Kim's fourth LP is released while the artist is in prison and is the first with a sober cover. The production is put together with beats from guys who have names I'm embarrassed to even write. The guests are Tiny, The Game, Bun B, Twista, Maino, Snoop Dogg, Jack Jones Knight, T.I. and Sha-Dash. I tried to do a track by track but it came out as nervous mess as this album. Kim wants to save on production and she's not rewarded by the final result: the music bounces and annoys all the time, while the girl spits random bars, staying in her comfort zone and creating as generic a mainstream rap album as possible.
She's allowed, again, to plunder from Biggie Smalls' rich coffin for this project too. The material offers little to say. There are the singles, something works, especially when JR Rotem is behind the keyboards: "Whoa" is a light-hearted and cheerful choice in which the Brooklyn emcee delivers one of the best songs on the album, while “Last Day” features a light pop beat over which Lil Kim delivers with a calm, clean, solid style compared to the rest of the CD. Scott Storch produces "Lighters Up" and it works while Kim steals flow and mood from Damian Marley's hit "Welcome to Jamrock".
The rest of the album is a pain because these amateurs can't make beats. Mista Raja is joined by Mr. Williams (later known as Mike WILL Made-It) in the production of "Shut Up, Bitch": both make one of the worst beats of the year, with terrible sounds taken from children's video games, the entire song is unlistenable. The guests add nothing, disadvantaged by a squalid production, not even Snoop Dogg manages to make something memorable over an annoying music that is meant to be a tribute to g-funk. The Game comes to support Kim in "Quiet", where the girl decides to copy Eminem's flow over a beat that recalls Eminem.
80 minutes of this is not bearable. A third of the album are skits. The rhythms are terrible. Guests are useless. Published by Queen Bee and Atlantic, the album was a great commercial success, sixth on the Billboard 200, third among hip-hop albums and one of the best-selling albums of the year. It's also very well received by critics. Perhaps too much. For "Pitchfork" it's one of the best hip-hop records of the decade. Same opinion for "PopMatters" and positive opinions come from more or less everyone. "Vibe" exaggerates with a perfect score, but what surprises everyone is that even the famous "The Source" exaggerates by assigning 5 mics to the album — it had never been done for a hip-hop album released by a girl — and losing the very little credibility it still had left after the purchase of Benzino. 4/10.
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