I have a soft spot for old gangsta rap, so I very much enjoyed this album. It isn’t great by modern standards but listening to this compared to a lot of stuff that was coming out in 1990 is night and day. It is honestly kind of weird hearing Ice Cube rap about some of this stuff compared to his modern, pretty family friendly persona.

That said, some things straight up aged kinda poorly. The “looking for the hanger” line on You Can’t Fade Me/JD’s Gaffilin’ made me physically cringe and the “Oreo cookie” line doesn’t hold up well either. That sad, it has been 33 years, so I can forgive some lines as being of their era. That said, some of the production is…messy? I don’t know a lot about music production but on What They Hittin’ Foe, when the guitar is coming in over his voice, and then is briefly just in the left headphone? That sounds like shit and I doubt it sounded good in 1990 either.

Overall, I love this album and have since I first heard it ~18 years ago. Ice Cube’s voice is one of the best in Rap and his flow is timeless. A lot of stuff from the early 90’s has really dated sounding flows but Ice Cube somehow makes his pretty simple flow come out in a way that sounds good 3 decades later.

Something else I found funny, did anybody else thing that part of You Can’t Fade Me/JD’s Gaffilin’ sound exactly like the flow from Real Muthaphuckkin G’s? Specifically when he says “Cause I know you’re tryin’ to break me, but if I find out your tryin’ to fake me”, I was instantly reminded of Eazy E saying “when ya talk about sprayin me, the same records that ya makin’ is payin me”. I know this sort of thing was pretty common back in then, but didn’t they have problems? Just thought it was funny.