Reasonable Doubt Review

The technical achievement is that a twenty six year old wrote a whole album about drug money and never once raised his voice. The cadences are conversational, the internal rhymes are dense enough that people are still finding them, and the point of view is the rare one in rap that treats crime as an accounting problem rather than an adventure. Can I Live is the thesis, greed and calculation and a man who knows exactly what he is trading away.

Dead Presidents II and D'Evils are two of the best written things anyone released that decade. Regrets closes it on genuine remorse without ever asking for forgiveness. The production is jazz loops and soul chops from a small circle of Brooklyn producers, warm and unhurried, and it never competes with the voice. It sold modestly and made him no money. Thirty years later it is the album he is measured against, including by himself, and nothing afterwards quite got back to it.