Over woozily patient soul beats, the two spent these albums shading and developing their personas, adding depth and resonance by opening up and getting emotional without ever sacrificing the ripping impact of their hardest stuff.
The good news: Those albums are both classics, arguably the two high-water marks of these guys' aesthetic. 1, two albums that the duo recorded for Tony Draper's Suave House label in the mid-1990s. The bulk of the album comes from On Top of the World and In Our Lifetime, Vol. But that's not what We Are the South does.īall & G recorded too much material for too many record labels for a real best-of to ever happen, and We Are the South is more quickie cash-in than anything else. And iPods being what they are, it's not hard to construct that narrative for yourself, to watch these guys develop over the years. (Those last two albums, in particular, are the reason best-of albums were invented: a few undeniable snarls surrounded by seas of halfhearted radio-targeted filler.) Their outlaw-duo chemistry was there from the beginning, but over the years since Comin Out Hard, the two cultivated a fascinatingly schizo approach, swinging haphazardly from visceral bone-chilling pimp-talk to warm, openhearted up-from-nothing inspirational tales. But the highlights from their last two albums, for Diddy's Bad Boy label, were exemplary streamlined head-knock club-rap. On 1993's Comin Out Hard, their national debut, they kicked exaggerated crime-life tall-tales for six or seven minutes at a time over homemade car-trunk beats, never bothering much with hooks or structure. An honest-to-God best-of from the Tennessee rap duo 8Ball & MJG would work something like a pocket history of Southern rap.
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