How's THIS for veteran- 1990's Short Dog's in the House was Too $hort's 6th album (!) and although I like his sound a lot, it's as simplistic, minimal, and funky as I'm willing to go with rap and I'm guessing a lot of people are the same way- album number five (Life Is...Too Short) is the start of the critical appreciation of Too $hort and that's having looked past the negative ones of which there are plenty
Issues with Short Dog include his misogyny (he practically invented it in rap) and his minimal aesthetic. If you can't do the minimalism that's fair enough, but just know that from Life Is...To Short on, Short and his producers performed the funk riffs they loved so much rather than just sampling them. So it's minimal but that just means you should be dancing to the bare essential FUNKness of it and listening close to Short's rhythmic MCing which is intentionally simple. But what's he rhythmically rapping about over bare essential funk? He's a pimp rapper so it's usually gold and hoes. That's not necessarily always the case on occasions such as The Ghetto- the song which brought me and probably heaps of others to Short Dog's in the House. When people called him out for being a misogynist he'd claim he was going for a persona or character, which is what a lot of rappers claim and actually mean (like family man/architecture connoisseur Cube or youth football coach Snoop), and a few conscious songs on Short Dog's in the House not only prove that the persona is either a fantastic way to attract controversy and sell records, escapist ghetto phantasm, or boldly satirize such a phantasm and the social ills which continually lead to its creation, but make Short Dog's in the House easier to listen to because of the variety. It's not much and it's still a long listen, but that's cool, I like it
Also, The Ghetto. C'mon
B+
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