Too $hort — Born to Mack

Todd "Too $hort" Shaw was born and raised in Los Angeles, then in 1980 he moved with his family to Oakland, where he became a drummer in a school band. In the mid-eighties, together with his friend Freddy B, the boy produced custom songs on cassette for people in Oakland and the Bay Area.

In 1985, Too Short released "Don't Stop Rappin'", a cassette published with the independent Oakland label 75 Girls Records and Tapes including five songs created with a cheap drum machine on which Too Short spits freely. More than for the intrinsic quality of the product, the boy's first tape goes down in history because it's one of the first in the history of hip-hop to use the word «bitch» — a word that will become a trademark for the artist himself and on which the rest of his career will gravitate starting from the following "Raw, Uncut and X-Rated" where he appears in three titles out of five tracks.

In 1987, Too Short released "Born to Mack" and changed his moniker by replacing the "S" with a dollar sign. After releasing several cassettes on 75 Girls Records and Tapes, this became his first effort published on wax, released by Dangerous Music. Eight long tracks that all last between six and ten minutes, except for the introductory "Partytime" and the closing "The Universal Mix", for a total of over fifty minutes of material.

This record spreads like wildfire paralyzing the radios of Oakland and the surrounding area to the sound of slow funky rhythms and extremely sexual cuts. After sold around 50.000 physical copies from the trunk of his car, the rapper signs with Jive and the funky LP master of the Bay Area — reissue in 1988 with RCA distribution — makes a breakthrough in the Billboard ranking of rap albums (#50), obtaining a national resonance and giving a precise direction to what will be the West Coast, being certified gold record by RIAA in 1992.

Dirty, slow, irregular and deeply misogynous (his favorite word he's pronounced so many times that you will tire of hearing it. Nah, how can you get tired?), unfortunately it also has some flaws: the production could have been better and the disk length is excessive in its abundance, however the rapper remedies with worked flow and good breath control techniques. To be a self-produced street album intended exclusively for the regional underground market, it's a coherent effort — far too much: it never deviates from the chosen themes and from the funky vintage beats — gritty and surprising.

Rating: 7/10.