Tha Block Is Hot Review

There is a version of this record that gets remembered as a curio and that is roughly what it is, though the charisma is real from the first bar. The Mannie Fresh production is the whole New Orleans template in one place, skittering hi hats, cheap keyboard leads and a bounce that will not stop, and it is fun in short bursts and exhausting across sixty eight minutes. The title track is a genuinely great single, all urgency and hook, and Respect Us has some snap.

Everything else is a teenager doing exactly what the older men in the room told him to do, hard talk delivered without any of the strangeness that later became his entire identity. The writing is basic, the subject matter borrowed, and the album exists mainly so you can measure the distance to what came next. As a document of the label at its peak it is genuinely useful. As a listen it is very much a first album.