No longer subject to the commercial expectations of their late-90s heyday, they should be able to talk directly to an audience for whom the first Lox album in nearly 17 years is “highly anticipated.” There’s enough time-stamped gossip in “What Else You Need to Know” to reward people who remember the narcissism of small differences fueling the D-Block and State Property beef and, yes, Sheek Louch utters the magic words “bring New York back.” More importantly, the voices and the wordplay of Styles P, Jadakiss, and Sheek have aged not one bit since 2000-no mean feat if you’ve tried to talk yourself into a recent Wu-Tang or DipSet project, or hell, just skip to Prodigy sounding like a wax figure of himself on “Hard Life.”Įven within the narrow narrative structure on “What Else You Need to Know,” the chemistry between the trio is still a marvel. Filthy America.It’s Beautiful has little interest in telling it. Their bizarre career is probably their biggest asset at this point and they have a hell of a story to tell.

Now signed to Roc Nation, the Lox are once again close to the locus of money, power and respect, affiliated with their third megastar-owned hip-hop conglomerate in as many albums. While DMX and Ruff Ryders’ constant shirtlessness and bloody-knuckled Casio beats were a corrective to hip-hop’s sample-happy Shiny Suit era, with enough distance, they could all be lumped together as “late ’90s NYC rap.” And most bizarre of all were the once-estranged Lox screaming “if you glad that L-O-X is Ruff Ryders now!” during “Wild Out,” their first single after a nasty, public and possibly violent extrication from Bad Boy-referred to as “Rape'n U Records” on the subsequent We Are the Streets. Lil’ Kim was as magnetic as ever, but tragically so, going blank during large portions of her past hits.

Shyne lip-synced “Bad Boyz” in exile from Belize. There were innumerable cameos at the Bad Boy Family Reunion Tour, but as is often the case with nostalgia packages, “the inexorable march of time” stole the show.

The lox we are the streets album zip