Thomas Wlodarczyk began his career in hip-hop in the early nineties, became an affiliate of Naughty by Nature and signed a contract with Capitol Records at the age of eighteen. Two seasons later, the Perth rapper Amboy, New Jersey's, publishes his first LP under the moniker Miilkbone. The production is mainly handled by Mufi, along with Nick Wiz, Twig, Kay Gee, Butch Whip and Steve White. Guests are local rappers Kandi Kain, Middy and Trip. 18 tracks, 4 skits, 54 minutes total.
This white dude of Polish origin's album should be the standard for making rap albums for suburban white kids. The lyrics of him don't offer you many insights: battle rap, braggadocio, a lot of complaints about his being born and raised in the ghetto and how the guys from the outside can't understand his problems and his sufferings. A few socio-conscious bars, nothing new in essence. The production is good, despite being made by many unknowns, in addition to Kay Gee, producer of Naughty by Nature. The music is as simple as it's good, it mainly consists of inserting a dusty and hard dry midtempo drum machine, soft bass lines and a melodic sample from a seventies song, end, you have a sound carpet solid enough for an interpreter with Miilkbone's technical qualities to flow for an hour with his slow, regular style.
The album starts off very well, with two excellent cuts. "Ghettobiz" boasts a rhythm performed by Nick Wiz: boom bap solid, drum midtempo, dirty and dusty, perfect, smooth jazz sample that gives the beat a dark and cinematic feel, beautiful. On this production, Miilkbone delivers velvety rapping. The following track is even better, it's "Keep It Real". Classic since the second zero: that piano of "Melancholy Mood" by The Marian McPartland Trio, is one of the best things of 1995. The drum chosen by Mufi is flawless, hard, dry, midtempo. The chorus directly merges three AZ excerpts from "Life's a Bitch" from the year before, then the rapper delivers hardcore and the song, chosen as the lead single, ends up on the charts. It's a rhythm you already know. That you should know. It's popularized by the freestyle of Big L and Jay-Z at the Stretch and Bobbito show in Fall '95, where Big L provides one of the best rap performances in the game's history.
The rest of the record isn't as memorable in the remaining fifty minutes, albeit it retains a pleasant musical tone and competent rapping, with some extracts that stand out thanks to samples from Biggie, Nas, Black Moon and Wu-Tang Clan. Distributed by Capitol, the label has no intention of adequately promoting it: Miilkbone, even with this kind of wack name with two "i", and a weird cover in which it's hard to read the artist's name and the title, may be the first successful solo white rapper in rap, but he's not, white rap albums sell themselves, right? Wrong. The CD struggles to enter the hip-hop chart (outside the top 80), and sells few copies, convincing Capitol to leave the rapper.
The rapper is released in a period when all white rap acts have been humiliated by Vanilla Ice, and Eminem is still far from reaching the masses to restore dignity to these few artists. When Mathers is finally launched in the industry three years later, well, the situation becomes even worse for weak white rappers (or considered as such), including Miilkbone himself, equated by Slim Shady with Vanilla Ice, whose career will be buried. In the following years, he releases independent material and ends up in a Death Row compilation, with a dissing track to Eminem, in response to a line of him in "I Don't Give a F***" a few years earlier. Despite the scant attention paid to it by the public and the mockery of professional critics, this tape is still a good listen for East Coast fans. 7/10.
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