By 2000, No Limit was an ambulance-chasing cottage industry par excellence, hauling scores of Dirty South gangsta records out the rear doors as fast as they could be recorded, unashamedly mining a seam of music that NWA had taken overground a decade before.
It shouldn’t have worked. Hip-hop – nay, the world – had moved on; and, for the first time in the game’s history, the South had risen and reinvented. OutKast were taking us to Stankonia, Missy Elliot was about to get …So Addictive with Timbaland – who himself, along with the Pharrell-led Neptunes, was dominating the charts with a string of nervous, jittery phuture-phunk that redefined R&B for the ensuing decade. Yet label head Master P’s homegrown supply was potent for a certain strain of hip-hop fan and, amazingly, his brother C-Murder proves one of the better of an over-stuffed market on Trapped In Crime.
Thuggin’, mackin’, smokin’, slappin’ – it’s all here, across a sprawling 24 tracks that sound just as you’d imagine them: chant-based hooks and cyclical beats, over-sexed imaginations and wild criminal boasts. It’s not hard to see just why No Limit remained a small-time operation; but that’s not the point: Like the best pusher, Master P knew what the kids wanted and wasn’t shy about stuffing them full with it.
