Since this is the last Haystak album that will appear in this series, I want to clarify that while I like to clown the dude--trust & believe there is plenty about him that is clownable--there was a time when Haystak's music meant a lot to me & I'll never deny that he is hugely talented. When everything goes right, his music can be uniquely captivating & convincing. Portrait of a White Boy is the album where pretty much everything went right. I always appreciated Stak 1st & foremost as a lyricist, & this album is his most consistently lyrical from front to back, even as he tackles a diverse bunch of topics like shooting craps ("Hustle & Flow") & recovering from drug addiction ("My First Day") in addition to his usual lot of street shit, with a few plain old emcee ego trip tracks along the way.
Unlike some other records where Haystak sounds like he's describing the plot of a hood movie he just rented, his ambivalence about the street life feels utterly credible on songs like "Dadgummit" & "Red Light," the latter of which is an absolute lyrical workout, Kool G Rap style: "We'll get to beefin', machines'll be beepin' & bleepin'/Them straps'll get to clackin' & clickin', don't get caught sleepin', we creepin' & sneakin'/We let our actions do the speakin', when you leakin' on the cement you gon' see what we meant, I tried to prevent/This sequence of events..." Stak cagily named "Hustle & Flow" after the 2005 film he appeared in (still his biggest brush with the mainstream), probably in a failed attempt to get a placement on the soundtrack. He takes the topic of craps (a game he elegantly describes in 2 spoken sentences at the start) & expands on it to paint a picture of the desperation of living on the margins--selling fake dope at the club, gambling with the money you need to pay the bills--& all along keeping hope alive. On "My First Day" he raps from the perspective of a drug addict trying to get clean, & unlike most songs of this type, he continues the story through the 1st 2 years, acknowledging that recovery is a long road with no shortcuts. "Safety Off" is a regular degular "check out how good I am at rapping" song, but Stak absolutely kills it with his alternately melodic & gritty flow, plus his trademark wit that is as sharp as ever: "I'm the 45 holder that's bipolar, the mic stroller/The drug dealer, the weed grower, the dice thrower/I go through grass like a mower with a Ford motor/If this was chess I woulda made you flip the board over." Then there's "Strangest Dreams," another mortality-obsessed song where he uses a beautiful metaphor to describe death to his daughter, which is chillingly resonant after the earlier song "Red Light": "In case I'm not there when you turn 13/We all come to red lights we won't see turn green."
The problems that often plague Haystak's music are present on this album, but unlike other records where they spread like dry rot to threaten the integrity of the whole, they are mostly confined here. "Big" has a gross message that shames sex workers & hinges on the double standard about a woman with a large body count being undesirable. He makes that same ugly generalization 2Pac did, trying to divide women up into good girls & bad girls: "I dig women, but it's the fucking hoes I can't stand." There's also a gay slur that shows up in "Stak's World," but it's the only one on the album. Also on "Stak's World," on a less troubling but really just cringe level, he tries to make a new slang term out of "shabbed" ("when being shot & stabbed are 1 & the same"). For some reason I don't think that one ever took off. Of course, he occasionally still sounds like Cartman from South Park, especially on the chorus of "Still You Doubted Me," which is an otherwise great entry in the grand rap tradition of "proved them all wrong when they said I wouldn't be shit" songs.
Of course, Haystak's most pervasive problematic pattern is his insistence on treating white rappers like an oppressed minority. I am willing to acknowledge that the early '90s was a different time for aspiring white emcees, who didn't have many credible role models. Still (speaking as a white rapper myself) the amount that whiteness benefits us in the larger society far outweighs any extra difficulties we might have proving ourselves in hiphop communities. Any pushback or skepticism we receive from Black hiphoppers is entirely justified, given the colonization & vulturization that hiphop has been subjected to. Thankfully, there's only 1 song on the album that plays this card, aptly titled "First White Boy." Additionally, Haystak includes a bit in the liner notes encouraging his listeners to vote in the 2004 presidential election, declaring "No more George, no more war. Yeah it's that simple." Especially considering a lot of his Southern white boy audience might have been Bush fans, that's a bold move. So politically speaking, it's a wash.
I've written before about Sonny Paradise & his incredibly cheap MIDI beats. It's a constant issue with Haystak's music, especially in the early 2000s. We don't get off to a great start production-wise with the budget strings of "Fight, Write, Die," but when "Dadgummit" comes in with the eerily reverbed pizzicato picking, Sonny somewhat redeems himself. "Safety Off" is another production highlight--the strings are still cheap but the piano makes up for them. Generally speaking, the album's production is on the right side of the "too-cheesy" line, & when it does cross it, the bars are its saving grace.
Overall, Haystak never sounded so inspired & energized before Portrait of a White Boy, & he never would again. I might not bump it very often anymore, but this record & I have a lot of history. When I put it on this time, I was prepared for disappointment but to my surprise it mostly holds up. It's certainly the only album I wouldn't hesitate to recommend to anybody wondering what the big ol' Tennessee white boy is all about.
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