Apparently E-40 likes Revenue Retrievin a lot more than I do; enough to release another set just one year after the first. That’s another two albums; twenty songs each or forty new songs. Get it? “40” new songs? It’s a concept you can appreciate only if, rather than being a fan since the beginning, you didn’t really start fucking with E-40 until his Ghetto Report Card gave him a sudden burst of mainstream popularity. By then, the overall quality of his music, once consistently good, had fallen off tremendously. That’s thanks mainly to an array of underproduced beats influenced by California’s Bay Area “hyphy” movement.

This album is still new-school E-40, but there’s a song included in which he declares at the beginning of the track that he “had to bring back that old-school mob sound”. The beat he proceeds to rap to, with its melodic bassline, sounds just like the kind of beat he used to rap to, which suggests he hasn’t completely lost touch of what helped make him the rapper he is today. Why he doesn’t make an entire album that sounds like that, instead of letting his son (Droop-E) tarnish his catalog with amateur run-of-the-mill production, is the question. That song though, entitled My Money Straight, is one of the album’s best.

There are a few wack songs, but most are just mediocre with dull hooks. The very first track, for example; a 2011 remake of the Mister Flamboyant anthem from two decades ago; relies on repeated snippets of movie or TV-show dialogue, which just sounds stupid. What’s smart, on the other hand, is E-40’s decision to start rapping fast again, rather the fact that it seems he’s starting to rap faster more often like he used to. That, along with the fact that what he says in his verses is almost always interesting and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, makes the hundred-or-so verses he spits the best thing this album has to offer.

my rating : 3 of 5

2011