Who'd Have Ever Thought They'd Say 'Red and Meth Should Stick to Buddy Comedies'?!?




Meth: "What happened to the grimy beats we both used to rock back in the day?" / Red: "Well, Erick Sermon made like a dozen fuckin' beats with the same bassline on Doc's Da Name 2000, RZA went all Bobby Digital and shit, and that was about the end..."

Hip-hop heads already knew Redman was funny as hell from verses on all his albums - not to mention being one of the few rappers with half-decent skits on their records - and that Method Man was, too, from his part on the "torture" segment of the first Wu album.

Then the rest of the entertainment world took notice on Redman's fucking hilarious Cribs episode - the only enjoyable segment of the whole series, in my opinion. Meth's turn as NYC-hitman-cum-phony-ass-player Ike Love in Belly got him in the cinema spotlight, and then came a movie I never thought could possibly be good (and yet turned out to be one of my all-time favorite stoner comedies), How High.

And while both of them have retained their respective lyrical edges, their albums since about '98 have been pretty lackluster, including Meth's overly-lengthy sophomore album and Red's Doc's Da Name 2000, where Erick Sermon completely abandoned any pretense of creativity and farted out at least a half-dozen beats with the exact same bassline, a funk he stayed in until the "React" single.

Blackout! 2 comes a full decade after the kind-of-good original- 

(and with that, I come to the horrifying realization that it's been 10 years since I graduated from high school... damn... let's pause for a moment of slight depression at my loss of youth... alright back to the matter)

-and it's just as mediocre as you might expect. My hopes were raised a little by the first single, "A-Yo!" But then again, the exact same beat has been used already to fine effect by [I think] A.G. on his solo album, The Dirty Version.

I never thought I'd say this, but Red and Meth should stick to buddy comedies if they're not going to branch out and get some better production. They definitely have a hilarious tag-team chemistry.