The Dynasty: Roc La Familia Review

It was supposed to be a crew record and got reclassified as a solo album partway through, which is exactly how it plays. The guests take up huge amounts of room, some of them well, and the sequencing is arbitrary. What makes it matter is the beats. This is where a young Chicago producer gets his first real placements, where Just Blaze finds the sound he would spend a decade refining, and where the Neptunes hand over I Just Wanna Love U, a synth line that owned that autumn.

This Can't Be Life is the best song here by a distance, three verses about failure and dead children and near misses, more raw than anything on the two albums before it. Where Have You Been ends the record on a father's absence and no resolution at all. Uneven, overlong and historically important, and the great run that follows starts right here.