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G-spots
The geographical chasm between Ludacris and Xzibit
BY FRANKLIN SOULTS

For those who regularly cruise at two miles per hour through the shimmering mean streets of Top 40 hip-hop, the new releases by Ludacris and Xzibit are as distinctive as the cities that made them stars. As these fans hear it, Xzibit’s career traces the domestication and the subsequent desiccation of the Los Angeles gangsta sound (culminating with his current role as host of MTV’s Pimp Your Ride), whereas Ludacris embodies the excitement at the center of hip-hop’s current humid and hedonistic hotbed, Atlanta. That’s why, in late December, Xzibit’s fifth album, Weapons of Mass Destruction (Sony Urban), debuted at #43 on the Billboard album chart, exactly 40 spots lower than his previous disc, Man Vs. Machine (Loud), which was released just two years ago. Meanwhile, Ludacris’s fifth joint, The Red Light District (Def Jam South), fulfilled the lean rapper’s opening boast by grabbing the chart’s #1 spot like a birthright, even as sales of his 2003 release, Chicken and Beer (Def Jam), continued to pile up past the double platinum mark.

For others, however, these results might seem like a commercial distinction without much artistic difference, since both albums hammer away at the tiny G-spot that self-professed thugs and players have been rubbing raw for years. In their separate worlds, Ludacris and Xzibit flash gats, get boned and stoned, cast momentary doubts on the meaning of it all, and then lay those doubts to rest by getting "Back to the Way It Was" (an Xzibit title). What’s more, they do it in a panoply of mainstream rap styles that even tip into each other’s homelands, Ludacris on the West Coast smoove groove of "Spur of the Moment," Xzibit with the irresistible Southern-fried single "Hey Now" (the latter produced by the infallible Timbaland, who also provides one buttery beauty for Ludacris). And yet the reason casual rap fans might want to listen past these easy similarities is the one similarity that unites these albums at a deeper level — their reaction to these reactionary times.

Of course, a sly jokester like Ludacris would never grab the bully pulpit on his own initiative, but since his tangle with pulpit-grabbing bully Bill O’Reilly (he got Ludacris canned from his stint as an official Pepsi pimp a couple years back), Ludacris’s raps have demonstrated a purpose notable by its absence when he was rising as an easygoing misogynistic club MC. Back then, his ugly jokes lacked the daring smarts that elevated Eminem’s gender offenses into genre-bursting art. But whereas Eminem today can’t bear up under the weight of his success, Ludacris’s easy embrace of his jokester-rebel shtick now earns him the boast he drops on The Red Light District’s "Number One Spot": "Nobody light-skinned did rappin’ harder since Ice-T."

The difference is that Ice T wasn’t constricted by mainstream rap formulas — they just didn’t exist back then — whereas this former radio DJ would never think of violating the corporate blueprint even as he moons the current moral majority. Which is why both Chicken and Beer and The Red Light District mix some hardcore clunkers with the gems. Worse, Ludacris’s fame has attenuated the connection with his fans as never before — at one point, he boasts he pays more in taxes than you’ll ever make in your life, then he complains about the taxes. But Luda also lays out some of his most inventive tracks yet, like "Number One Spot," which riffs on every Austin Powers reference imaginable, and a wonderful closing string that ends perfectly with the old-school tribute "Virgo," which meshes cameos by Nas and Doug E. Fresh as if they actually belonged together.

Give him time and Xzibit will seem just as incongruous-but-right next to Ludacris. Despite their equivalent level of professional polish and reach, the distinction between Ludacris’s loose Southern bump and Xzibit’s hard West Coast grind is indeed as real as the sales figures suggest. Yet Xzibit’s gruff, straightforward, and somewhat ponderous raps are better served by his current broad, generic production than they ever were by the wheedling bombast of his former mentor, Dr Dre. And free of Dre’s gangsta fantasyland, he also finds a subject worthy of his hot, dry delivery.

The album opens with a press conference by the biggest bully to front a major American pulpit in our lifetimes, as a spliced-together Dubya announces, "The tyrant is me. I will kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country and across the world." Over the next 10 tracks, which culminate with "Hey Now," Xzibit paints a convincing portrait of ghetto nihilism, of hustlers living for today because the future is full of weapons of mass destruction pointed at poor people everywhere. After that, he soils the CD with pro forma hardcore crap, but as with Ludacris, the good stuff is more than worth getting to know. Maybe your enemies’ enemies aren’t always your friends, but how will you know if you don’t slow down?


Issue Date: January 7 - 13, 2005
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