The Inscrutable Ghostface

Why do critics love Ghostface Killah?

By Ben Adler

Paging through The New Yorker last March, I came upon a review of “Fishscale” an album the rapper Ghostface Killah had just released. “Here we go again,” I thought, remembering the curious accolades that an earlier Ghostface album had received in other hip outlets like The Village Voice. The reviewer, Sasha Frere-Jones, praised Ghostface’s rhymes in a manner verging on a parody of a modern critic in any medium. He explains the brilliance of the song “Barbershop” with this insight: “The point of the song isn’t what happens but that nothing much does,” and he excuses Ghostface’s scattershot lyrics by noting “Ghostface likes to interrupt himself.”

But perhaps nothing better captures the intellectualization of underwhelming rhymes than Frere-Jones’ reference to an earlier Ghostface song, about which he says, “what you take away is mostly Ghostface’s joy in the sonorous possibilities of the English language.” And here’s the lyric he quotes from it: “Swing the John McEnroe, rap rock’n’roll, Ty-D-Bol, gung-ho pro, Starsky with the gumsole. Hit the rump slow, parole kids, live Rapunzel but Ton’ stizzy really high, the vivid laser eye guy.”

Well, maybe Frere-Jones’ interpretation is one way to analyze it. But wouldn’t “Ghostface throws a bunch of random words together for no apparent reason, except that he’s probably high,” be a more straightforward one? (In homage here is my personal equivalent of that verse “Take the taxicab/used to act, and I ain’t that bad/Please, still got the allergies.”)

Alas, the critical adoration of Ghostface is not a quirk limited to one writer. “Fishscale” received plaudits from Slate, The New York Times ("he raps like a man on fire, evoking not only the excitement of an adrenaline rush but also the heightened perception that accompanies it,") Billboard, Rolling Stone, and Newsday. These appreciations were reiterated a few weeks ago as the music criticism world looked back on the past year. Metacritic awarded “Fishscale” its 7th best reviewed album of 2006, and the virtual hipster hangout Pitchfork Media ranked “Fishscale” the fourth best album of the year. Around the same time, reviews came out of Ghostface’s next album, the just released—and dare I say brilliantly named—“More Fish.” Sure enough, Pitchfork’s rival Stylus magazine, gave it a glowing review.

Why do all these hip critics love Ghostface? The answer actually lies in the Newsday review, which justified its esteem for Ghostface thusly: “‘Street’ doesn’t have to be stupid. ‘Gangsta’ doesn’t have to be immoral. ‘Smart’ doesn’t have to be boring. And anyone who still believes Eminem and 50 Cent are the best rappers around hasn’t heard Ghostface." This is all true—Ghostface is far more creative and original than most major commercial rappers right now. But this does not explain the level of glowing admiration for him. The fact that Newsday addresses a straw man who would be so moronic as to assert that 50 Cent or Eminem is the best rapper around does provide a clue though.

In recent years, hip-hop critics have continued to focus their reviews on well-known rappers from major labels, even as radio and television consolidation have choked the creativity of mainstream hip-hop and the innovative work has been forced underground. So, if you are comparing Ghostface to a stock character like 50 Cent, then yes, you find him a breath of fresh air. If, on the other hand, you are listening to the best hip-hop coming out of the underground, your whole metric is different. Plenty of underground rap groups, like Dilated Peoples and Jedi Mind Tricks, are street without being stupid, gangsta without being immoral, and smart without being boring. That Ghostface also manages to do so—sort of—is only a rare feat if you are unaware of most of the good hip-hop being produced these days, or you assume that your audience is.

A good example of the infuriating narrowness of the range of hip-hop covered by supposedly with-it outlets would be Time Out New York’s recent cover story on albums by new mega-rappers Jay-Z and Nas that declared “Few would deny that New York City rap has lost the battle to other hot spots in recent years .” This is utter nonsense, spewed by an ignoramus named Jesse Serwer, who apparently thinks that hip-hop begins and ends with what he hears on a Clear Channel-owned radio station. The South would seem a whole lot less dominant, and New York a whole lot less passé to Serwer, if he paid attention to immensely creative current New York rappers and producers like Aesop Rock and El-P or the new releases of great New York old school MCs like KRS-One. Of course, there is good underground rap in every region of the country, but Serwer is not paying any attention to, say, talented West Coast underground groups like the Freestyle Fellowship either.

Perhaps that explains why the same popular outlets give excessively positive reviews to even more undeserving beneficiaries than Ghostface. Take, for instance, Clipse: If ever there were a rap group with nothing particularly positive to add to the world, this would be it. But their monomaniacal focus on the same tired themes of rap from the bygone era of the crack epidemic is actually lauded by critics. Jonah Weiner, writing in Slate explains, “What separates Clipse MCs Malice and Pusha T from their gangsta peers is how they rap about the cooking, bagging, and selling of cocaine to the exclusion of literally everything else. … In this way, Clipse leave those of us whose neighborhoods haven’t been ravaged by crack to sit in the stench of our own voyeuristic enjoyment.” Only a professional critic who over-thinks simplistic lyrics for a living will take that lesson away from what amounts to a drug dealer’s industry trade magazine in album form. Similarly Evan McGarvey, who reviewed Fishscale for Stylus, gave Clipse’s “Hell Hath No Fury” an A-.

From a critical perspective, Ghostface is perfectly positioned. He is a member of the hugely popular Wu-Tang Clan, a group that real hip-hop fans value for its innovative styles and beats, less so for their sometimes incoherent lyrics. Ghostface maintains a certain idiosyncratic style and connection to the underground (MF Doom, one of the most interesting producers in hip-hop, did four of the tracks on “Fishscale.”) Simply put, he is one of the only remotely interesting rappers mainstream enough to get reviewed by these outlets.

So the problem isn’t with Ghostface, it is with hip-hop coverage in the mainstream media. If major magazines and newspapers woke up to the fact that there is a whole other world of hip-hop out there, then they would give rappers like Ghostface and Clipse appropriately nuanced reviews. In the meantime, hip-hop fans will just have to take all their reviews with a huge grain of salt.

Correction: This article originally referred to Madlib as a New York-based artist, when he is in fact from Los Angeles. We regret the error.

Related Stories

• Gender-Neutral Housing Comes to Princeton
• Campaign Communications Director, Repower America
• Toke Up Marijuana Laws
• Send a Health Care E-Card
• The Battle for Pittsburgh