Album Review: Tales from My Hood by Kurupt & DJ Battlecat
Ruling out the banks and liquor stores before hitting all of them anyway, Kurupt makes a record whose robbery writing outpaces anything he wrote about money.
Ricardo Brown was 16 years old when he relocated from Philadelphia to Hawthorne and 18 years old when he settled in Los Angeles. Nearly everything that he has ever written since then has been filled with people. Kurupt has always had names, and the particular detail that he is likely to go for first would be one that locates a person, whether it is about who is in the car, who was around when things went awry or whose house was empty that night. DJ Battlecat produced Tales from My Hood (who steals the show with classic West Coast and G-Funk production), and Kurupt uses much of this album to roll the name calls.
The job on “Sneak Attacc” is robbery whereby banks, liquor stores and the houses have to be ruled out and then put right back in. “We ain’t hittin’ banks, we ain’t hittin’ liquor stores/We ain’t even doin’ jack moves no more,” he says and adds, “We hittin’ all of the above.” Snoop counts six shots and marks the route from Crenshaw to Slauson, and then he begins to go wild through the verse like a night that has gotten out of hand. All the parties have to be hit, homies have to be seen on the wall with the blower, someone gets shot, the chase begins, and police start looking for the people associated with Snoop. In the second verse, the chase continues from inside the car: “Heater in my left, steering wheel in my right hand.” He is thinking about Texas. He would like to put money together so that he could set up a caravan out of town, split up and get back together at the spot if everyone makes it.
The bag must be got on “Me N the Boyz,” and getting it takes the whole song that comprises late nights of getting his money straight, a black card he has graduated to and calling shots from Long Beach to Watts. None of it has any night attached to it. The only line that has a person in it is the one that says, “They don’t sell they bodies, they just crack the stores.” The vintage “West Coast Muzik” thins out further. Butch Cassidy uses his verse to summon some girls over, Kurupt uses his last verse to take the girl from her feet up to her waist, and the song is complete before anyone in it has done anything.
D Smoke joins in “Wat U Do to Me” and adds more people in the room than either of these two songs has done: the women, the two-stepping, the party that is never-ending, and gives credit to Battlecat for laying the foundation. Snoop takes the last verse and uses it to give advice, practical ones like “Keep a good lawyer, Tom Sawyer.” Kurupt uses his own verse to roll lane to lane with the oldies up, thinking about 1988, stopping by for a blow of an eighth. “Damn, I miss Nate, but gotta get back on the grind,” he says and proceeds to hard times, hard living and heartaches. Ill Camille starts off “Mindstate” with the best guest feature on the album, remembering the day she met him and what he called her thereafter: sister and one of his killers, and he answers with a verse about going to war and coming back to going to war again, touring and coming back to touring again, and staying away as one of the reasons why he is still alive today.
Heartbreaks and heart mending and putting the heart back together again like Lego blocks on “Love Letter,” there are long walks, trips to the Caribbean, and the house she turned into a home. Above it all, Jane Handcock sings about lovers who have come and gone and carries the song. The line about Nevada is the one of his that sticks, as he knew that once they hit the state they were going to marry. There is more life early in “Special,” where he tells her that her game is too far back like a train caboose, rides down the street in an aqua vintage with ocean blue outside and lizard inside, and he folds a man who yaps. However, in the second verse he proceeds to write his bucket list and turn frowns upside down, and the woman he started out talking to vanishes in the furniture.
Four women appear before the one that he is addressing on “I Don’t Luv Her,” one in the streets, one a lawyer, one with green eyes and one named Latoya, and he ends the verse by saying that they have nothing on her. Then BJ the Chicago Kid starts singing a chorus about hurting her a million times with lies. Soopafly comes next, swearing there is no hate, reporting he thought she was on rotation between the two of them, and adding that he does not even like her that much.
The words on “Gunna” start outrunning the sense two lines into the first verse, “Detrimental, essential, Monte Cristo” into whole bodies saturated and entire blocks motivated. He works Warren G, Snoop and Dr. Dre into the same run and admits that he has got a problem in the head and drinks too much. However, one image is released from the others: “My thoughts is dark clouds, electrical storm/I can’t see the light when all the lights are on.” He calls himself standing tall, barbaric, Jurassic, gargantuan, a genius, a Venus flytrap and a seated tarantula. Verse two is meek compared to this, mostly cars and switches, and the first verse holds the whole song on its own.
On the previously-leaked “Mystic River,” he is purified like Arrowhead Mountain Spring Water after two sons and three daughters, and life sucks the breath out of a person like mosquitoes, and he scooped the game up like Tostitos. He is locked up banging the locks, stuck in the sanctum with a Newport menthol box, and stops to inquire whether there is any way out of the bad decisions he keeps making. However, the second verse is expansive, from Gabon to Nicaragua, and then narrows to four questions asked to a homie, including what he thought about his friend getting rolled up and what he wants now. He answers for him, and the answer is memories and the future ahead of him. These two verses contain more of him than the rest of what he wrote here.
Above Average (★★★☆☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Sneak Attacc,” “Mystic River,” “Gunna”