Album Review: Dragon’s Breath by Inspectah Deck & PA Dre
The Wu-Tang MC runs his hustle like a job with hours, a payroll, and a supervisor. The writing about work and betrayal is the best thing here, as the features are deep enough to carry nineteen tracks.
With his new album, Inspectah Deck has recorded a portrait of the sort of people who have turned their backs on him. One would hear about his friend whom he had backed with stacks of cash, who only used it to woo women and came back with no money and bitterness. There is also his partner who once did time and who now stocks products on the shelves at Winn-Dixie. The last minute of the song Solitude is a tale of a fifty-five year-old being talked to even as he is putting in quarter ounces for a boss who is half his age. All this fits Deck’s reputation as the least inclined of the Wu-Tang crew to take part in the incense and swords rituals and more interested in the grind; on Dragon’s Breath, the grind has a supervisor and a timetable, let alone skimming.
However, he does not start his verse with that. “The System,” the high point of the album, where the bookkeeping gets personal, and the boasting is left behind. In 2014 he put out a free project, Cynthia’s Son, made from records his late mother used to have in the house; the name is a statement of origin here. Young Deck was after crumbs. Close friends would throw shade and be cut off. And then comes the line that does more damage than any threat: “Same hater that did the bid with me/Was a baller, now he’s a stock boy at Winn-Dixie.” As for himself, his shift ends at 10:50. He is pitching piff in the bleachers at JV games, not dying for a block or a title.
On “Funny Style,” the finest writing on the album, that grievance is given a face and told in order. It has a beginning: he came up with a man who has been looking at him sideways since prison and fronted him money regardless. A middle part is where the man tricks it and starts calling out Deck’s name in the neighborhood. Then the end, with the man missing a few teeth and asking to hold a G. Deck has a laugh at him, knowing it doesn’t impede the cash flow, and reduces the whole matter to a question on the sidewalk: “Why you mad, bro?” Where other rap grudge songs offer a body count, this one provides a biography.
On “Up At Night,” he gives an itemized promise to a woman done with talking: the kitchen with the marble island, the 22 Mercedes with keyless locks, the kids kissed, and home at three on the dot. He also tells her the cost, that he is flipping prison time to climb as a two-time felon. When she says “come home” in the second verse, he concedes, “Maybe I should,” about as honest as one can be. “Burgundy” is stranger still. Enemies are neighbors, and best friends are not, and he poses the same query in triplicate: if you could see your future, would you still be thugging online? He asks someone to check on his family, just in case.
None of it is as cold as “Solitude.” Here Deck handles the labor, scrambling in camo Timbs in forty below weather through rain and sleet, Pyrex on the stove. A life, he says, that comes with a certificate of authenticity. There is Flee Lord and Hus KingPin, appearing as kindred spirits in the trade. Flee Lord has put away his pack holder days for the more sedate life of a stack holder; he will mix his Versace with fatigue and spend an afternoon at the bodega with the bundles by the chips.
Deck lets some two dozen rappers have their way here, but he takes a verse on seven of them and gives up the rest, coming out on top of the deal in the end. Skyzoo puts in an appearance on “Never Fold” as Rap Lee Morgan, a hard-bop trumpeter of sorts who doesn’t touch a horn and is still using the phone number from when he was making a name for himself locally. He finishes by wondering if anyone has seen how down in the dumps he looks in a photo, face, and neck drawn in. On “Lighter Fluid,” Mickey Factz has made his way to Mount Haleakala with a trident, meditating in a tiger’s cage and putting the heat on his enemies with a little Betty Crocker vodka before getting spooked by what might have been. KXNG Crooked doesn’t wait to be seated, as he makes his own table and decrees that retirement is a bank figure, not an age. You have Raekwon on autopilot and Cappadonna sounding like he has come in off a cookout, which is feature material on a Wu disc.
But the album’s finest work is not Deck’s. Sa-Roc makes “Divine Protection” her own, transforming from modest to goddess as she dispenses universal law. She is a living tabernacle raised in Babylon for battle, and she will have you know her appetite for destruction is greater than any need to oblige. Che Noir is close behind her, speaking with the cadence of Amanda Seales and the complexion of Coco Jones. Grief was her first feeling, she says, so thoughts don’t come easy, even after you have put together a few thousand by sixteen. Her final bar about a white man and a dark complexion is as sharp a political statement as you will find here.
At sixty-seven minutes and nineteen tracks, there is too much running time for the song quality to handle, and the album sags in the middle. “Anointed” features Deck relaxed as ever in his kush clouds with all sorts of luxury surrounding him in his hunter green Cayenne, talking about the fifty percent commission like it is on a rate card. 7xvethegenius and 40 B.A.R.R.S. both beat him on his own track. 7xve gets the inspector to inspect his verse and realize that she is the one. “Flight School” gets its pun and then loses steam on a girl looking for a signature on her chest.
“Cold Case” is an odder kind of failure, but, in certain respects, even more interesting. It builds on place and pace and race and brace and lake; halfway through, the rhyme scheme does all the talking for him. Still, he manages to squeeze out a boast or a joke that he is the elephant in the room, but Ransom follows immediately, covering four times the ground, settling the matter without trying.”
Institutional weight comes late but with good results. Hell Fire gets “Possession” off on a strong Five Percent note, the W standing as a beacon above Gotham, and Deck gets right into it with Off-White dunks. The last couple of tunes are for CZARFACE with 7L, and Pat Van Dyke on production, and the change of scenery seems to put Deck at ease. On “Czariana Grande,” he is carving rhymes in stone instead of writing them, with a hook that puts 7L and Esoteric on the marquee. Esoteric will have the psychiatrists say he is deranged while he is ruling with the crown, tracing the group from Park Hill to Cabot Street. By “Explicit Material,” they are having a fine time of it.
It all goes back to the best joke on the album, where the complaint is hidden. A fan has to make the case for Deck on “One of One,” saying Meth will put him in his top five, and you should show some respect. Deck does the same on “The System,” rolling his own name out five times and a Rollie Fingers to boot. He ought not to have to. CZARFACE Meets Frankie Pulitzer is out in a fortnight, and the Clan is to be inducted in L.A. in November; he will be answering for it all fall regardless.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “The System,” “Solitude,” “Funny Style”