Fishscale

Sound DNA

• Hip-Hop
• East Coast

• gritty
• swaggering
• urban

About

Fans might argue over how to rank his best albums, especially when you get to the top (<i>Ironman</i> or <i>Supreme Clientele</i>? How lucky we are to live in a world with both), but if you want to hear everything that makes Ghostface one of the best rappers to ever do it in one place, it’s 2006’s <i>Fishscale</i>. As a storyteller, nobody paints such full pictures in so few words (“Shakey Dog”), not to mention has the range to come back two tracks later with the kind of gym-ready raps-for-rap’s-sake that make you grateful the form was invented (“The Champ”). He can do pop (“Back Like That”), he can do posse cuts (“Be Easy”), he can do old-school soul-sampling drug rap (“Crack Spot”) and streams of consciousness that would make quote-unquote alternative rappers pale with envy (“Underwater”). And hey, if a big-time label like Def Jam is willing to listen, he can even sing—just don’t expect him to do it in tune (his verse on “Jellyfish”). Wu-Tang might’ve bridged the gap between what we think of as mainstream and what we think of as underground, but it was Ghostface who maintained it. By this point, Wu-Tang was dormant, and rap was shifting toward novelties like Dem Franchize Boyz and D4L on one hand (beautiful, exhilarating novelties) and the mixtape-driven experiments of Lil Wayne and Gucci Mane on the other. Not gangsta, but trap; not New York or LA, but Atlanta. An artist like Ghostface was on some level a throwback just for continuing to exist—not to mention one wading into the uncharted waters of being a rapper over the age of 35. Few rap albums of the time have aged better.

via Apple Music

Tracklist

Credits