Consumer Guide Album

Jean Grae: This Week [Babygrande, 2004]
"Oh, who's that? Oh, oh that's your girl, you're with her? She looks like everyone else in heah." The dis caps a spoken-not-rapped intro mini-skit, and the intonation is perfect: Jay-Z in cute braggart mode. Grae can rhyme, and if she had a male larynx and a production budget (plus a little luck and additional applications of promotional muscle), her hype men, chipmunk soul, minor-key piano hooks, and "I wanna rock a fella so bad" might stand underground on its head. But she doesn't have those things; she's an "insecure failure/Can barely maintain I wanna scream like Mahalia." Thus her triumph remains strictly aesthetic, and pretty strange, which in the long run can only increase her insecurity. She needs a message bad. B+