Album: Shyne

Godfather Buried Alive, DEF JAM

Shyne's great claim to fame lies in his taking the fall in that P Diddy/J-Lo club incident a few years ago, which ended up with the teenager banged up for discharging a gun. Nearly halfway through his 10-year stretch, this effort (presumably of mostly leftover tracks) finds him railing in "Quasi OG" about a "Secret society manipulating the deaf, dumb and blind/ 'Cept they wanna blame it on Shyne", as if he were one of the FBI's Most Wanted. He has a fanciful line in self-aggrandising paranoia throughout Godfather Buried Alive. "Grand Jury couldn't understand my fury for fast cars and jewellery," he claims in "Godfather", one of several tracks featuring details of coke-dealing, the most succinct being the business plan of "More or Less": "Step on it twice and bring it back/ Get four times what you pay/ Divide the labour costs and still come away with enough to play". But more irritating than his self-pity or his braggadocio are the frequent interjections of "Brooklyn, Vietnam!" which seek to inv

Shyne's great claim to fame lies in his taking the fall in that P Diddy/J-Lo club incident a few years ago, which ended up with the teenager banged up for discharging a gun. Nearly halfway through his 10-year stretch, this effort (presumably of mostly leftover tracks) finds him railing in "Quasi OG" about a "Secret society manipulating the deaf, dumb and blind/ 'Cept they wanna blame it on Shyne", as if he were one of the FBI's Most Wanted. He has a fanciful line in self-aggrandising paranoia throughout Godfather Buried Alive. "Grand Jury couldn't understand my fury for fast cars and jewellery," he claims in "Godfather", one of several tracks featuring details of coke-dealing, the most succinct being the business plan of "More or Less": "Step on it twice and bring it back/ Get four times what you pay/ Divide the labour costs and still come away with enough to play". But more irritating than his self-pity or his braggadocio are the frequent interjections of "Brooklyn, Vietnam!" which seek to invest Shyne's criminality with a bogus political agenda. It's easy to see what attracted Puffy to Shyne: his delivery is dark and sullen, like Biggie's, and his gangsta pretensions are just as tacky a blend of bling-bling and bang-bang.