Test Spin: No Good

Artistic endeavors named “No Good” are not promising, and this album doesn’t defy this logic. Mr. Fatal and T-Nasty comprise the group and imbue their album, Gameday, PBB, with their distinctly quotidian rigmarole. No Good began as dancers for 2 Live Crew, a group that does not need to perpetuate itself into the next century. Case in point: the intro to the album, cleverly titled “Intro,” basks in all the different ways to enunciate the words, “no good,” for two minutes. The next few songs analytically explicate how to “get crunk” and “lay down” by chanting variations of the phrases for 15 minutes. With a synth line straight outta 1970 prog-rock arbitrarily alternating with syncopated violins, “Call of the Streets” is practically avant-garde, particularly since the rappers don’t seem to be making coherent statements. On the devolutionary Z-grade-Master P-funk of “Keep It Real,” No Good makes an impassioned plea for returning to the days when everyone was exchanging crack and bullets, “mackin’ me a fat ho with big hips.” It’s not exactly “The Waste Land” on wax. Most of the songs are what rappers do at concerts between songs, sounding like what would happen if bone-crushingly banal hip-hop ever bred with Tourette’s syndrome. There are some lasting implications such as how T-Nasty can “thank the man upstairs” after he has solicited girls to “suck on my pee-pee.”

Archived article by Alex Linhardt