![pharrell in my mind bonus version pharrell in my mind bonus version](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/qrmaPJinbyo/hqdefault.jpg)
Thinking of Dave Chappelle helps, though. Just imagine Kool Keith on shrooms, and you won't be anywhere close to what I'm getting at.ĭirty covers the Rick James song to hilarious effect, but I still can't shake that spooky feeling. I should mention that this album is much harder to listen to than his first solo release, possibly because the effect of the various drugs in DIrty's system caused his rhymes to be more erratic than they used to be. Irv Gotti takes a sample from TJ Hooker and gives Dirty a track that sounds like he's going to introduce tonight's edition of 20/20. ODB sounds as nuts as he always did, but you immediately miss The Rza's dusty basement beats. (I heard his rap parodies on that Born Suspect album, the comedy CD he released before hooking up with Prince Paul I was not impressed.) Pookie does his best to not completely embarrass himself, and Pharrell does his falsetto thing on the hook, a harbinger of things to come in Pharrell's (and pop radio's) future. I don't remember reading anywhere that the world was clamoring for Chris Rock to rap. RECOGNIZE (FEAT CHRIS ROCK & PHARRELL WILLIAMS) But that's only due to how he would later die, of a drug overdose, which was spookily similar to how Rick James passed.ġ. But hey, "Got Your Money" has a good beat, and you can dance to it, so I suppose that was enough incentive to risk looking like a fucking racist at the record store.Īnd who doesn't love that cover, with Dirty doing his best Rick James impression? N-a Please was a critical and commercial success, surprising since in order for an album to sell as many copies as N-a Please did, white people would be forced to actively seek out an album with the n-word in its very title and purchase it with a straight face. Some would look at this as a dismissal of Dirty's champagne dreams, but I choose to believe that everyone else was busy churning out terrible sophomore efforts, or in the cases of Deck, U-God, and Masta Killa, they were busy trying to convince The Rza to finally let them release their debuts, arguments that would actually work for two of the three artists involved, with mixed results. Other than the Abbott himself, there are no other core Wu members appearing on N-a Please. and getting-arrested-for-possessing-Viagra-without-a-prescription fame, also provides some of the production duties here, and the majority of the rest comes from Dirty's beloved cousin Robert Diggs, a/k/a The Rza. However, after hearing it a few times, I realized that the song was pretty damn catchy, so I guess that experiment worked. Normally the idea of a rapper whose very name screams "radio friendly" trying to appeal to the masses with a pop hit would sound ridiculous, and that's how I took it when I saw the first video, "Got Your Money", which featured Kelis back when she had big hair and nobody knew who the hell she was. Upon purchase of N-a Please, ODB's second solo album released on Elektra Records, one notices that a certain production duo who wouldn't normally even be considered to be considered for a Wu project pops up on three tracks: The Neptunes were tapped to bring a more commercial sound to this project. However, he wanted to try something different. He would always have ties with the Wu-Tang Clan, especially since the other two founding members were his cousins. After some turbulent times (drug addiction, frequent run-ins with law enforcement, crashing the Grammys), Russell Jones decided he wanted to become a superstar.