UGK may well be the most influential hip-hop group you've never heard of. Long before Dirty South became rap's most successful sub-genre, UGK had laid the template: gooey bass-lines, honey-coated guitars and sugar-sweet soul samples, matched to deliriously violent and misogynistic raps. They only covered a few select topics - cars, drugs, women, cars - but they did so with a sardonic irreverence that's rare in contemporary rap.
The chemistry between UGK's two emcees was the key to their success. On one side was the sneering and charismatic Pimp C, who laid the foundations of sleaze-rap with one-liners far too offensive to reproduce here. Ahem. On the other was Bun B, who provided the counterpoint as rhythm master, lacing tracks with his booming, machine-gun baritone. Like the best old-school hip-hop duos, each rapper brought out the best in the other. On Jay-Z's "Big Pimpin'," the group's sole flirtation with the mainstream, the sheer magnetism of Pimp and Bun's delivery left Jay-Z sounding like a novice.
Sadly, the group is no more. In December 2007, Pimp C was found dead in a West Hollywood hotel room, having overdosed on codeine - the drug responsible for turning Lil Wayne's voice into wheezing sandpaper. And yet, rather than wallowing in the aftermath of his colleague's death, Bun B appears to have been reinvigorated by the tragic incident. In the last fifteen 15 months, he's released a highly successful solo album, guested on a raft of singles and dedicated himself to collecting studio scraps for UGK's final, posthumous record, released last month under the bombastic name of "UGK 4 Life."
Listening to the record is an inevitably odd and even creepy experience, but luckily "UGK 4 Life" doesn't fall into the trap of many posthumous releases. Unlike the flood of Tupac and Notorious B.I.G. recordings released like clockwork each year, "UGK 4 Life" is neither mawkishly sentimental nor awkwardly cobbled together. There's a reason why Pimp crooning, "Back from the dead!" in the album's opening moments is so spooky; listening to an album as cohesive as this, you could easily believe he was right.
As ever, Pimp handles the lion's share of the production duties, which means nary a synth in sight - and on a rap album in 2009 that's something of a godsend. I don't know when rappers decided they were tired of real instruments, but the lush, caramel sound of "UGK 4 Life" proves it was a poor choice. Where most contemporary rap songs bludgeon emcees into submission, Pimp's luxurious productions have always done the opposite, giving rappers the space to show off their rhythmic skills. On "UGK 4 Life," the instrumentals are so smooth they positively seep out of the speakers; every track drips with golden guitars and burbling bass.
Like every other UGK album, the songs are evenly split between lewd sex-raps and chest-pounding ghetto sagas. The lascivious tracks are certainly more memorable; it seems like Pimp, true to his name, just got dirtier with age. Over the burbling, bare-bones synths of "Hairy Asshole," Pimp sneers, "Got a young brown stallion, and she twenty years old / when she pop it from the back you see that hairy asshole." This gem of a lyric is then repeated at least twenty times, with "brown" variously replaced by "red," "white" and "yellow." Not offensive in the slightest, really.
Best of the sex-raps are "Hard as Hell" (I'll let you guess what that's about) and "Steal Your Mind," in which Snoop Dogg, Too $hort and Akon turn up to pay homage to the original purveyor of hip-hop sleaze. Both tracks come off like perverted rap battles, each emcee trying to outdo the last in their sheer tastelessness. Both times, Pimp is the clear winner, constantly pushing the boundaries of good taste, and even, occasionally, human physiognomy (in your eye?).
He's not serious, though. Promise. Only a man openly insecure about his relationship with women would call himself something like "Pimp C," and throughout his career the rapper has consciously toyed with his image, dropping in occasional feminist anthems amidst the flurry of tasteless sex-raps. Pimp embodied the contradictions of his genre, and his death only took those contradictions to their logical extreme.
And what of Bun, the other Underground King? Well, his metallic baritone has always been better suited to boasting put-downs, and on the majority of "UGK 4 Life," he leaves the smut to his late partner. Instead, Bun focuses on the dangerous flip side of the gangster lifestyle: drugs, guns, pushers and the police. It's this combination of extreme vulgarity and ghetto storytelling that's always been UGK's calling card, personified by Pimp's dirty drawl and Bun's authoritative boom. Only a group like UGK would be able to pull off a track like "Purse Come First," which matches an anti-government corruption rant from Bun with a chorus like "Dick is a commodity, bitch / The purse come first."
On the majority of the album, however, the sex raps and the ghetto anthems are kept firmly apart, and it's on the latter that Bun is able to prove himself, once again, as one of the most talented rappers in the game. Lyrically, it's true that Bun is nothing special: he raps about how good he is and how bad everyone else is, and that's pretty much the extent of his range. Aesthetically, though, his raps are things of extraordinary beauty, rhythmically intricate and jam-packed with internal rhyme schemes: Where most rappers only rhyme the last words of each line, Bun often fits five or six rhymes into a single sentence.
The opening "Still on the Grind" may have Bun's most potent verse in years, his chrome-steel flow holding its own against the track's deafening rap-rock beat: "We get septic man / when shit get hectic man / roll with the Trill we don't deal with the skeptics man / Forget on record man / what you expected man / Bun and Pimp is back so just respect it man." As the track's tempo increases, Bun's flow adjusts accordingly: "We get licks / with them bricks / 36 in the mix / with no tricks / get a fix for your clicks." I don't have a clue what he's on about, but damn does he sound good saying it.
And in the end, it's this sense of style that will stand as UGK's greatest contribution to the hip-hop genre. UGK's revolution was an aesthetic one, not an intellectual one, and they never pretended to anything more; if they wanted to make deep music, they wouldn't have called themselves "Pimp" and "Bun." UGK's music is vapid, but beautifully so, and "UGK 4 Life" is as fitting a close to the group's dramatic story as one could hope for. It's not an album that wallows in the death of its creator. There's no slushy eulogizing, and barely a moment is taken to wax nostalgic. Instead, as funk icon Ron Isley sings on the deliciously smooth "The Bun and the Pimp," it's business as usual: "Here we go again."
4 paws
Pros: A fitting tribute to one of the greatest hip-hop duos of all time -expert rapping from Bun B, hilarious lyrics from Pimp C and wonderfully organic production
Cons: A couple of weak tracks (mainly the ones not produced by Pimp C) and lyrics taht some might find ever-so-slightly offensive
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