Welcome back to The Optical Files, where Cullen Wade revisits a different album randomly chosen from a pile of 180 CDs in his basement. If you are confused about what's happening or why it's happening on this blog, click here for an intro.
The Giancana Story was supposed to be G Rap's debut album for Rawkus & was supposed to drop in 2000. Instead of coming out on the premier underground hiphop label of the era at the peak of its importance, it got tangled up in some business confusion, delayed for 2 years & finally licensed to Koch (the dumping ground for a lot of rap records in the 2000s). Apparently the Rawkus album had a different tracklist with a lot more features, but it's possibly for the best that we got the lean, under an hour in length, relatively light on features record we did.
Since parting ways with Polo, G Rap did the post-Illmatic thing of working with several producers per album, but Giancana exceeds his previous 2 solo records by featuring 14 tracks with 10 producers. Despite this, the album has a fairly unified sound, it's just not a sound I really vibe with. This is quintessential early 2000s New York street rap, post-boombap--samples were out, MIDI was in. (A lot of this was by necessity, as music publishers were cracking down on sample clearance.) Virginia's own Bink!, best known for his work with Roc-A-Fella, only contributes one beat, but it's the best of the bunch: "Where You At," which brings an eerie vocal chop, booming timpani, tom rolls & sparse kicks to G Rap & Prodigy's cold street tales. (Yes, this album is so New York that it has Prodigy & Havoc features on 2 different songs! Along with AZ & a very young Joell Ortiz, they are the best features; nobody else really impresses.) The overall feel is noisy, aggressive, thickly textured beats, but with a lot of polish, if you like that sort of thing. Personally I would have appreciated a bit more grit & fewer goofy vocal hooks ("Black Widow" & especially "Drama" are offenders).
Kool G Rap is one of the most technically proficient lyricists to ever pick up a microphone. Subject matter-wise, on this album he leans into the NY mafioso style he innovated, which had a major resurgence in the '90s thanks to Raekwon. G Rap's writing here is uniformly excellent--so uniformly, in fact, that it becomes a bit exhausting. It's undeniably impressive to hear him stretch the same multisyllabic rhyme over 32 bars, but both his delivery & subject matter are kinda monotonous. Far be it from me to try to tell one of the inventors of thug rap not to rap about thug shit, but there are no storytelling joints on this (a first for his catalog), no sex songs, no ego tripping joints, no songs from G Rap's more rueful sociopolitical side like "It's a Damn Shame" or "Streets of New York."
Although it was technically a higher-profile label, at the turn of the century releasing an album on Koch rather than Rawkus feels like a downgrade. Apparently the Rawkus version was leaked multiple times in different configurations, as well as some loosies that made their way into the wild. I haven't investigated, but if that version is more balanced re: subject matter, it might be something I'd prefer to 4,5,6. This isn't.
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