Snoop Dogg: Paid Tha Cost To Be Da Bo$$

As his involvement in opportunistic direct-to-video movies, Insane Clown Posse albums, hardcore pornography, and Girls Gone Wild videos attests, Snoop Dogg has never been big on quality control. That refusal to delineate between a good effort and lazy hackwork carries over to his solo albums, which tend to strand a few knockout songs amid a barrage of filler. With his pioneering work with Dr. Dre, Dogg helped define the G-funk sound, but 2000's Tha Last Meal confirmed that he'd ridden that sound about as far as it would take him. Although far from a radical break from his past work, Paid Tha Cost To Be Da Bo$$ helps revitalize his career by pairing the gifted rapper with heavyweight producers from the South and East Coast. Of course, the last time he deviated from the G-funk template, the result was 1998's abysmal Da Game Is To Be Sold, Not To Be Told, a career low that pasted his laconic drawl onto No Limit production team Beats By The Pound's frenetic, clattering New Orleans bounce. Dogg fares much better with Paid Tha Cost, an album split evenly between slow-rolling West Coast G-funk and intriguing, largely successful stabs at expanding his sound. Dr. Dre is conspicuously absent from Paid Tha Cost's squadron of producers, but the album doesn't lack production star-power. The Neptunes, DJ Premier, Hi-Tek, and Just Blaze take turns behind the boards, and collectively, their work towers over the familiar production of second-generation G-funksters Jelly Roll, Battlecat, Meech Wells, and Fredwreck. Paid Tha Cost has already scored a hit with the infectious, Neptunes-produced "From Tha Chuuuch To Da Palace," but "Beautiful," his other Neptunes collaboration, is just as good. "The One And Only" gives him the DJ Premier treatment with terrific results, as does "Batman & Robin," which brings back Death Row-era Dogg colleagues RBX and Lady Of Rage and jacks the beat from the Adam West incarnation of Batman. After enduring years of threats and insults from his old boss, Dogg finally lashes out at Suge Knight on "Pimp Slapp'd." The result isn't quite the "Takeover"-like triumph it should be, but it nevertheless closes a strong (if characteristically overlong) album on a memorable note. Dogg lays out the intricacies of Crip-walking alongside Nate Dogg on "The Streets," the swaggering first single from W.C.'s Def Jam debut Ghetto Heisman. Though an established East Coast (and, more recently, Southern) powerhouse, Def Jam hasn't had much success breaking into West Coast rap, but with Ghetto Heisman, it backs a winner. One third of territorially minded supergroup Westside Connection, W.C. possesses one of rap's most unpredictable flows, a sort of sideways nasal roar that enlivens even the most familiar subject matter. Aided and abetted by gangsta-rap all-stars Scarface, Snoop Dogg, MC Ren, Ice Cube, Nate Dogg, and Mack 10, W.C. celebrates the wanton hedonism of the gangbanging lifestyle throughout Ghetto Heisman. Though expounding at length on the joys of being a "career felon," W.C. does show smatterings of a social conscience. On the tellingly titled "Tears Of A Killa," he draws a direct parallel between gangbanger turf wars and George W. Bush's warmongering, while "Something 2 Live 4" offers an emotionally charged, hardboiled narrative about the kidnapping of W.C.'s daughter. Breathing new life into a frequently hackneyed genre, Ghetto Heisman puts the fun back in G-funk.