Gravediggaz
6 Feet Deep (Gee Street) (STAR)(STAR)
From the Wu Tang table comes a rap quartet that turns over the gruesome and gory with rabid skills. The Gravediggaz’s point of departure is a post-mortem, hell-dwelling non-existence, with flashbacks to the electric chair as well as Russian writer Gogol (“Diary of a Madman”), to a fatal “Defective Trip” as well as to encounters with “1-800-SUICIDE.” Even with their rotten language and funereal imagery, the Gravediggaz’s grim rapping is not the lurid, flesh-chopping of, say, Insane Poetry. The Gravediggaz pursue most of the elaborations of their too-obsessive theme, positing themselves as ancestors whose lessons we should heed or face the consequences. “You can’t come back/No matter what you do when you fall in the deathtrap,” says one tune about child sexual molestation that ends in a gunshot bang.
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Ratings: Excellent (STAR)(STAR)(STAR)(STAR) Good (STAR)(STAR)(STAR) Fair (STAR)(STAR) Poor (STAR)
