After this, the Queens bred duo went into the studio with Marley Marl to cut their first full length, Road to the Riches. More singles followed until G Rap's appearance on " The Symphony", a Juice Crew posse cut that also featured Big Daddy Kane. Kool G Rap & DJ Polo appeared on the New York hip hop scene in 1986, releasing "It's a Demo" (produced by Marley Marl) and becoming recognized members of the Juice Crew. ( July 2017) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Perhaps most significantly, there is greater emphasis on vivid descriptions of crime and urban squalor ("Streets of New York") and references to organized crime, gang violence, contract killing, and Mafia films (the title track, "Money in the Bank", "Death Wish"), which helped cement Kool G Rap's reputation as the founder of mafioso rap. Lyrically, the album shows a greater variety of themes, from the battle rap braggadocio that dominated Road to the Riches, to topics of crime, poverty, racism ("Erase Racism"), and raunchy sex rap ("Talk Like Sex"). State of Mind" from his critically acclaimed album Illmatic. The singles "Streets of New York" and "Erase Racism" received notable airplay on Yo! MTV Raps and the former is credited by Nas as being influential on his song "N.Y. The album was released a year after the duo's debut, Road to the Riches, and received greater acclaim from most music critics. But like all the best stories, you’ll want to hear it again as soon as it’s done.Wanted: Dead or Alive is the second album by the hip hop duo Kool G Rap & DJ Polo. Unlike that album, it doesn’t have a coherent storyline to bring you from a definitive Point A to its corresponding Point B. That’s what makes Wanted: Dead or Alive stand out among its peers: it seems effortlessly tossed off, but upon further listens reveals itself to be as painstakingly considered and sequenced as something like The Wall (1979). Mostly the beats here are sharp and driving, matched perfectly to their rapper. Some of them even seem a little timeless, like Large Professor’s fantastic “Money in the Bank” production, the hook of which could probably bring down any club worth its salt. The beats here often sound dated but satisfyingly so, well-fit to the album’s texture as a gem of the early ‘90s (check out the awesome DJ Polo showcase “The Polo Club”). He doesn’t, though, which just edges the album ever closer to masterpiece status. The guy could probably rap over some kids banging on trash cans and it would still be engaging. And then suddenly, on “Talk Like Sex,” he’s the funniest rapper alive (“You ain’t ready for the bed / You still got a pussy like Isaac Hayes’s head”). This is first and foremost because Kool G Rap is one of the greatest rappers of all time, lyrically precise, vicious, and dramatic (“Blood stains all on my Ballys / A sucker got rowdy, so I shot him in the alley”). Biggie’s “Suicidal Thoughts” and its legion of copycats-but here it is shaped into something big and important-seeming. That a gangster can be both the facilitator of and in thrall to his own constant moral transgressions may seem by now a cliche-cf. Listen to the album’s opening one-two punch of “Streets of New York” and “Wanted: Dead or Alive,” in which he bemoans the crime-ridden state of his beloved city and then seems to implicate himself as the cause. Kool G Rap, meanwhile, is interested in the flux state of the gangster life, or perhaps all of life itself. This places Wanted in stark contrast to later classics like Illmatic (1994) and Reasonable Doubt (1996), both fantastic but siphoning their prestige from a sensibility that moves in only one direction. Kool G Rap exists as the converse to such a process: he's an “everything” rapper, a lyrical kaleidoscope of influences and desires, of both sermonizing (“Streets of New York”) and seduction (“Talk Like Sex”). This seems to me indicative of a shift in rappers’s creative faculties around the early ‘90s, wherein a sort of division of labor gave rise to a newly specialized rap. Wanted: Dead or Alive is one of the very best “Golden Age” hip-hop albums, a vivid prophecy of just about everything the genre could represent. #94: Kool G Rap & DJ Polo, Wanted: Dead or Alive (1990)
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