For over 30 years now, Ghostface Killah has rapped each whirlwind verse like a bomb was ticking down and he needed to empty his cranium of all transgressive thoughts before gloriously exploding into a thousand pieces at the end of the song.Whether threatening to piss in your apple juice, or boasting about being so strong that “Primatene mist is afraid of my lungs,” there’s a race-against-time, last-stand energy to Ghost’s muscular storytelling raps that will always sound totally unique.
Take “Nutmeg” (produced by Black Moes-Art), where Ghost weaves in and out of a complex, hiccupping bassline and swaggering Blaxploitation-era strings.Here the Staten Island emcee transitions from exchanging back-hand swings with tennis star John McEnroe to dancing with the cast of The Golden Girls, eating exotic “seasoned giraffe ribs” and, finally, triumphantly wearing a gold hat he just stole from the mummified corpse of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun.
Despite these audacious lyrics wildly gliding back and forth like a lost kite caught up in a hurricane, Ghost somehow finds a way to reign it all in, meaning his whining prose has more in common with deliberately freeform authors like Aldous Huxley and James Joyce than any rap peers.Since threatening to blow up the spot like Waco cult leader David Koresh back on explosive 1993 smash “Bring Da Ruckus,” the opening song of the Wu-Tang Clan’s classic rap game introduction, Enter The 36 Chambers, and then forming a shivery, Columbian necktie-administering alliance with coke rap roaddog Raekwon via 1995’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx (a.k.a The Purple Tape), Ghostface hasn’t really stopped innovating, revealing more layers to his artistry as the years have progressed.
With 1996’s “All That I Got Is You” he made the first rap song ever capable of making me cry, poignantly conversing with wailing strings and reminiscing about being one of 15 bodies squeezed into a tiny three bedroom apartment: a place whe...