Consumer Guide Album

Raheem: The Vigilante [A&M, 1988]
For all his disco suck-ups and rock samples, this Houston rapper has gone nowhere, which I'm afraid reflects inept promotion or raw regional prejudice rather than the political consciousness of the market. His handle I tolerate--up against the but-then-you'll-get-caught glamourizations of an Ice-T, anticrime outside the law has its ethical attractions in a time of unpoliced drug war. But even in rap his contempt for women is something special--whether freak or whore or crackhead, the human detritus he means to blow away is almost always female. And first, if she's lucky, he will test his theories of natural lubrication, summed up in a rhyme whose accidental acuity shouldn't get lost in the cutout bins: "I got the tool that she needs/To make her insides bleed." C+