Nate Dogg — Music & Me

The vocal ‘Jack of all trades’ of hiphop drops his third solo-album just after I found out about his previous two albums. His low and incredibly cool voice appeared on many hiphop records by the likes of Warren G., Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and Ludacris. It sometimes made me wish those rappers would shut up for a while. So now I have three records full of Nate, what a treat!

The G-Funk of Nate Dogg is a mixture of hiphop, firmly rooted in (P-)funk, old soul and R&B. As usual many people from the G-funk scene pop up: regular guests like Snoop, Dr. Dre, Xzibit and Kurupt. The tracks are produced by Mel-man, Dre, Battlecat and lesser known people like Megahertz and Bink. This trend of having a different producer for each track seems to be the modus operandi in hiphop and contemporary R&B for a while now and I guess it was invented to have all different tracks, just to please everyone except the people who are little bit more picky when it comes to producers. P-Diddy infiltrated into my collection via Ice Cube’s Peace disc but luckily kept his mouth shut. Now Jermaine Dupri manages to sneak in (for the second time)! Although his production of Your Woman Has Just Been Sighted is bearable, the fact that he also feels he has to add some vocals is quite annoying. Oh well, minor inconvenience....

Luckily everything else is great! Nate’s voice ties everything together and keeps it ‘gangsta’. Music & Me contains smooth and beautiful tracks like Backdoor and the magnificent I Pledge Allegiance with Pharoahe Monch (erm, think I’ma check his album real soon) and funky tracks like Ditty Dum Ditty Doo and the Dr. Dre production Your Wife makes this a perfect soundtrack for the summer that’s ahead of us. Cruising yo hood in yo fourwheel drive wit yo hoe next to ya... (huh? Which ‘hood’? Which ‘hoe’? Which ‘fourwheel drive’? Oooh, sweet fantasy :-).

Although the lyrics are not my cup of tea, I don’t see much romance in this gangstashit, I can live with it. Some lyrics are kinda stupid but I see it as a kind of folklore, not mine, but it fits this music like a glove. You can compare it to watching The Godfather: no way I would like to live like that, but somehow I like to watch it.