Hip Hop's Most Dependable Absurdist

"Predictably Outstanding...Rehab delivers everything we've come to expect from hip-hop's most dependable absurdist — more psychedelic, coke-addled crime fiction spit relentlessly over horny rewired soul samples.”

This quote from New York Magazine’s Vulture Blog perfectly summarizes the Ghostface Killah aesthetic as captured in his new album The Big Doe Rehab.

The beats are jacked-up seventies R&B samples, laid over hard-hitting bass and snares. It is a sound that Wu Tang invented but that Ghostface has taken to new heights with Fishscale, More Fish and now The Rehab Album, all dropped within the last year-and-a-half. The end result is a sound that is both sweet and grimy, like candy that you found on the street.

The lyrics are more graphic than his last two albums. This can be accredited to the artist’s revitalized fame, which has no doubt propelled his decent into the hip-hop underworld of cocaine and ultra-violence. This is best exemplified in track number 4, Walk Around, which is a recount of an execution-style shooting at a bodega in New York City, and the subsequent getaway:

Flashbacks of me blowin' his brains out,
All I remember's my shirt, I couldn't get them goddamned stains out
Oxy cleans weak 'round the chest area, Right hand side,
I'm pluckin' off li'l pieces of meat…

While the rants on The Big Doe Rehab do not reach the levels of absurdity characteristic of albums such as Bulletproof Wallets, Ghostface breaks out the crazy with versus like:

G4 Jets with like three or four pets,
That’s bats, chickens and hens all the same sex…
Walk through the Amazon spilling Don Moet,
To find my way back I have to leave a trail of baguettes…

The Big Doe Rehab is a solid album from a solid artist who is keeping east coast hip-hop alive nearly a decade after its prime.

- Andrew Hoffman, Contributing Editor, Sound & Vision