Re-Up Gang Makes Another CLASSIC Mixtape

Tom Breihan from the Village Voice gives his views on the NEW Re-Up Gang mixtape entitiled Clipse: Back with Vengeance.

Maybe not all rappers care about this; maybe not even most. But Clipse seems to exist specifically for that moment where the first time you're hearing a verse you can't quite believe what you're hearing, where you close your eyes and squinch your face up and maybe pound your fist against your steering wheel or your desk the empty subway seat next to you. Any number of reasons exist why we haven't heard from this group at length since 2006's Hell Hath No Fury: they've been touring, they've been figuring out their label situation, they've been reeling from the overwhelming commercial failure of HHNF. But I'd prefer to think they've been hunched over notepads somewhere, figuring out just how many ways they can still figure out to say that they used to deal drugs, obsessively rewriting their lines over and over. The Lil Wayne model where you record ten songs in a night and leak them all the next morning doesn't work for these guys. Every line on their new mixtape, (deep breath) We Got It 4 Cheap, Volume 3: The Spirit of Competition (We Just Think We Better), is a product of intense work. Lyrically, this thing is so dense it's almost exhausting, and I'm going to need a while to fully process the whole thing; even on my sixth or so listen, half the stuff on the later tracks still sails over my head. But that magic face-squinch moment happens over and over again.

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