A few weeks ago when I wrote about Kool G's 2002 album The Giancana Story, my main critiques were of the production & the monotonous subject matter. If I'd known this album would be coming up on the random number generator so soon, I would have offered Live and Let Die as a counter-example. Not only does this album feature the best production G Rap ever had, it also switches up the subject matter often enough to keep things interesting, without ever veering out of the emcee's established lane.
In the Giancana piece I wrote: "Far be it from me to try to tell one of the inventors of thug rap not to rap about thug shit," & indeed, there's not a song here that doesn't fall into the general thug shit category, but within that there's so much variety. G Rap tells extravagant crime stories ("On the Run," "Train Robbery"); sex raps both descriptive ("Fuck U Man") & comically narrative ("Operation CB"); grim observational pieces tinged with social conscience ("Crime Pays," "Ill Street Blues,"); focused rhymes on specific street topics ("Go For Your Guns"); general braggadocio ("Letters," "#1 With a Bullet"); vivid tales of madness approaching horrorcore territory ("Straight Jacket," "Edge of Sanity").
The fresh sound of the album is thanks to West Coast producer extraordinaire Sir Jinx, making his first contributions to NYC hiphop after several years of working with Ice Cube & his associated acts (Cube & Jinx's partnership even predates N.W.A.). The result is a beautiful bi-coastal blend of sounds, with NY's noisy rat-a-tat-tat colliding with LA's stoned, loping funk in tracks like "On the Run," with its slow tempo & skanky guitars, & "Crime Pays," which could easily be an Ice Cube track circa Death Certificate.
G Rap hadn't developed his extended multisyllabic rhyme schemes yet, but this is peak lyricism for this era of his career. He keeps up with Big Daddy Kane's rapid-fire patter on "#1 With a Bullet," & spins heads around in the bar-baric "Letters." As always, I'm less impressed with his lyrical treatment of women. "Fuck U Man" is a sequel to "Talk Like Sex," & as always I struggle to imagine any woman thinking these come-ons sound appealing: "I'm leaving bitches' vaginas with more stitches than Frankenstein." He's bragging about his sexual prowess (in particularly violent terms) to an audience wholly made up of other men--which is fine, but probably not what he intended. Anyway, the misogyny reaches a career low on "Train Robbery," where he literally boasts about sexually assaulting one of his mugging victims. Obviously the song is so outlandish as to make no pretensions to realism, but it also lacks the perspective that might give a moral dimension to the brutality.
A good comparison for the rape talk in "Train Robbery" is Geto Boys' "Mind of a Lunatic." G Rap is clearly influenced by the abject, debauched style of the Texas crew on songs like "Straight Jacket" & "Edge of Sanity," & he goes so far as to invite Scarface & Bushwick Bill onto the closer, "Two to the Head," also featuring Jinx's partner Ice Cube. I think Cube brings the best verse to this posse cut, but all 4 emcees do prime work here.
3 weeks after this album dropped, The Chronic came out & completely obliterated any momentum Kool G's brand of hardcore might have had. Still, the closing track sums up the whole album: bringing together the finest ingredients from the east, west & south to create one of the key gangsta rap albums of the transitional period as the '80s combusted into the '90s.
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