Lemme keep it a stack: for a number of reasons, I'm trying to get away from the mental framework that pits rappers against each other. All those Top 5s & rankings & GOAT conversations, etc. 1st of all, obviously, art is subjective. But even if we think in terms of "favorites" rather than "bests," I still don't think art lends itself to ordinal ranking; it's kind of antithetical to the spirit in which most art is made. Specifically as it pertains to hiphop (where this kind of thinking is encouraged more than any other music culture), the mindset of competition that encourages rappers to be their best selves ("steel sharpens steel") also creates the kind of backbiting mentality that is poison to local music scenes. So the more years pass, the more I try to deprogram myself of the tendency, ingrained to some extent in every hiphop head, to rate & rank & elevate some emcees to the detriment of others.
With that being said: fuck you, Big Pun was nicer than your favorite rapper. Yep, that one too.
Despite about 4 dozen feature appearances & an unfinished, cobbled-together sophomore album, Pun's legacy rests on this debut LP, the only album he completed during his lifetime--& what a legacy it is! Pun was a rapper's rapper, & every verse is an absolute masterclass in rhyme writing. Beyond the headspinning multis, assonance out the ass, internal rhymes nested inside other internal rhymes, startling turns of phrase & unexpected poetic devices, what impresses you most about this album is his consistency. The dude never phones it in, never strikes out--never even bunts. Every single verse is a screaming moonshot over the grandstands. That holds true whether he's solo or collaborating, whether he's working in a hardcore or pop milieu. Not long ago, I asked on social media whether there is a high-charting rap song more lyrically intricate than "Still Not a Player." There might be a few ("Ms. Jackson" by Outkast, Naughty By Nature's "O.P.P."), but I still maintain "Still Not a Player" is in class by itself. When other rappers said "I want this to be a single so I'mma simplify my bars a little bit," Pun said "hold my Big Gulp."
But of course, that's not the album's preeminent lyrical workout. I'd probably vote for "The Dream Shatterer," which is the closest he gets on the album to a straight-up ego trip song, i.e. "rappity-rap." I know a lot of people disdain the practice of rapping about rapping for the sake of rapping, but I don't know how that's possible when Pun breaks out like this: "You ain't promised mañana in the rotten manzana/Come on, pana, we need more rhymers/Feel the marijuana snakebite, anaconda/A man of honor wouldn't wanna try to match my persona/Sometimes rhyming I blow my own mind, like Nirvana/Comma, and go the whole 9 like Madonna/Go try to find another rhymer with my kinda grammar."
All those multisyllables suggest a clear forefather to Pun's style, & that's Kool G Rap. Superficially their styles are very similar, but in my writeup on The Giancana Story I shared my opinion that G Rap is so good that it gets boring after a while. Pun sidesteps this trap by doing a few things differently: first, his flow is a lot more nimble than G Rap's: he slows down to emphasize his punchlines, speeds up on the onramp to another rhythmic run, switches into triplet flow & back again mid-rhyme scheme. He also has more flavor in his voice, varying his inflection in contrast to G Rap's hardcore monotone. He also just generally has more humor & charisma, offering a certain geniality that doesn't interfere with his gangsta affectations. The closest Pun comes to G Rap's style is the title track, where he raps in a measured monotone & maintains a steady flow of almost uninterrupted syllables. That's a shame, because the song is conceptually interesting, comparing white supremacy's systemic condemnation of the ghetto to a death sentence. It doesn't help that Pun is joined on that song by Prospect, his most monotone compatriot. Pun also echoes G Rap's absurd sex rhymes in the song "I'm Not A Player," which features such bizarre & anatomically ignorant boasts as "Climbing up the walls with my balls banging off your hymen." I try to stay away from Biggie comparisons because he & Pun don't really have that much in common other than stature, but this song is obviously "One More Chance"--you know, the 1 track that keeps Ready To Die from being a flawless album & should have been swapped out for its remix?
Pun's bars are clearly the star of this album, & when you have something so lyrically dense, the main thing you want from the production is that it not interfere with the words. Most of the beats satisfy that, offering a gritty, often sinister gym mat for the lyrics to perform their acrobatics on top of. There are a few musical standouts, though, like the movie-score dramatic strings of Domingo's "The Dream Shatterer," the Latin jazz horns of "You Came Up" by Rockwilder, or Knobody's poppy pianos on "Still Not a Player." Showbiz contributes the beat for the closer "Parental Discretion," whose wonky, off-kilter keys sounds like it was tailor-made for Busta Rhymes to demolish, so it's a little odd that he only contributes the hook & a spoken-word outro.
Speaking of "Parental Discretion": in my memory, Capital Punishment was full of bangers but overlong & frontloaded. Well, it is certainly long, but it is most definitely not frontloaded! For an album of this length, actually, it's remarkably well-sequenced. Early-album standouts like the Black Thought feature "Super Lyrical" (you have to be crazy confident as an emcee to go toe-to-toe with Thought) are balanced out by late-album highlights like the aforementioned closer & the RZA-produced "Tres Leches (Triboro Trilogy)" ft. Prodigy & Instectah Deck, which gets my nomination for the most NY rap song of all time. It's hard to make a 73-minute album feel coherent & unbloated, but Pun pulls it off through sheer artistic vision. Most of the time when I revisit a well-loved album for this series, I find myself in a nitpicking, critical frame of mind. This time, I actually came out of my analytical listen liking the album more.
Hearing, seeing & thinking about Pun always makes me a little sad. Here was a brilliant writer, a once-a-generation talent, whose life was cut tragically short simply because he couldn't make his body do what he wanted. Why are some things preternaturally easy for people & others preternaturally difficult? You can feel this struggle against cosmic unfairness in songs like "Fast Money" & "Capital Punishment," where if you strip away the gangsta bravado you're left with the anxious pleas of a gifted young man who feels like the world is spinning out of control, looping a lasso of intricately braided words to rein it in--trying to outrap a runaway train. I think this fueled a lot of the anger that was evident in both his music & his personal life. I won't sugarcoat it, because I know we've all seen that footage of Pun pistolwhipping his wife. There is no justification for spousal abuse, but it's a fact that hurt people hurt people, & while he was less nakedly confessional than some other emcees, we can make some pretty safe inferences about the source of his hurt. Being betrayed by his body again & again behind a relatively simple task that most other people seem to accomplish without any work at all must have been baffling for him, especially since he had seemingly effortless powers of eloquent self-expression.
I know my readership here is an enlightened crowd, but I feel the need to say this anyway: stop making fun of fat people. Stop assuming that being fat is a choice, or the result of laziness or poor self-control. As a matter of fact, stop fixating on other people's bodies altogether. I promise it's better that way.
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