Consumer Guide Album

Mia X: Unlady Like [No Limit, 1997]
Her mackstress bona fides are predictably generic despite the gender-bent pimp routine, and even after she progresses to the womanisms that dominate the second half of a typically excessive 80-minute No Limit disc, she can't very well avoid cliches: adoring her kids, mourning her G, fending off her current knucklehead, she's role-playing straight up. But especially after she expresses her love for a dead homegirl, her declarations of leather-skinned cynicism and wit's-end vulnerability take on a retrospective weight that counterbalances their surface contradictions. A ghetto story, real as fiction. B+