Few rappers could ever match the Jacka’s cult of personality:
Roughest of the rough, hardest of the hard — with just enough
humanity to be believed. For starters, he named himself to honor his
talent for burglary. Then there’s the cover art on his new album,
Tear Gas, which depicts an army of young men with gas masks and
bullet-proof vests. On the inside flap he sits at home brandishing a
shotgun and watching his own “Wanted” ad flash across the TV screen,
while a S.W.A.T. team tries to break down his door. Such imagery
recalls an earlier era of hip-hop, when Ice Cube made political gangsta
albums that were as much about his conflicts with the cops as his
dissolute lifestyle. Had Jacka released Tear Gas a couple years
ago, it might have seemed antiquated. Now, with the Oscar Grant
prosecution well underway, he is right on point.
The first single on Tear Gas — a two-chord radio hit
called “All Over Me” — has anomalous presence on an album that’s
more about feeling angry and disaffected. You ain’t ready/Nah, you
will never be, Jacka sneers on the hook to “Just a Celebrity,” a
song that reveals his reservations about fame and selling out. It’s a
political line he maintains for most of the album: on the poignant and
painful “Summer,” which is about wasting away the summer in jail; on
“Heroes,” which sounds like a cryptic homage to cop-killers; even on
the Beastie Boys spin-off “Girls,” on which Jacka declares himself a
committed bachelor. Despite the acerbic content, there are a lot of
things to praise about this album, from Jacka’s distinctive,
half-singing, half-snarling rap voice, to the cameos by Zion I and
Devin the Dude, to the melodic beats, which shore up the sentiment in
Jacka’s tales of the ‘hood.
The title Tear Gas combines a word for fuel with a word for
heart-felt emotion, and alludes to a form of chemical warfare. It’s
apropos. (The Artist)
