Ghostface Killah

Fishscale

(Def Jam)

5 of 5 Stars


Everyone can stop the hand-wringing about that empty New York hip-hop throne. Thirteen years after the Wu-Tang Clan released one of pop music’s most bafflingly brilliant records, “Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers),” one of the Clan’s most durable members has shown that he hasn’t lost a step.

“Fishscale,” Ghostface Killah’s fifth solo album, is the best of his career, an all-time rap classic on par with other great Wu-Tang solo efforts like Raekwon’s “Only Built 4 Cuban Linx” and GZA’s “Liquid Swords.”

Ghostface is a rapper of intellectual abundance. He crowds each track with so many narrative wobbles that just trying to keep up can make the listening experience as frenetic as the stories themselves.

Picking a favorite detail is an arbitrary exercise, but I’ll go ahead and choose “The coca leaf is slightly damp / Sproutin’ in the back yard next to Grand Duke tomato plants.” Where other rappers retell the same gangsta story, Ghostface writes his own.

“Kilo” nails a successful drug dealer’s paranoia, and the guns-n-drugs romp “R.A.G.U.” turns ugly when Raekwon breaks his wrist (he says, wonderfully, “I fucked up my writin’ hand”) and an accomplice shoots himself in the groin.

It’s hard to stabilize Ghostface’s characters, and in that sense they have an independence that is very rare in hip-hop. Stereotypes like Tupac’s reformed thug or 50 Cent’s muscled, gun-totin’, sex god aren’t characters; they’re devices a rapper can use to move a song along. Ghostface lets his characters get away from him. His stories are so exhilarating to listen to because he doesn’t seem to have complete control over them.

It’s not all gloom, though. The beat to “Back Like That” (there isn’t a bad beat on the album, by the way) has some of Kanye’s Chi-town bounce, and it’s hard not to laugh when Ghostface finishes his coke-cooking grocery list with “a cranberry Snapple.”

MF Doom’s goofy-smooth beat grounds the highlight “Underwater,” a surreal enlightenment dream combined with pop-culture collage. As “mermaids with Halle Berry haircuts” help Ghostface navigate the ocean floor, he spots “Spongebob in the Bentley coupe / bangin’ the Isleys.”

It is tempting to say that an album this weird just exists in its own vacuum, but with “The Champ” Ghostface asserts that he is standing on top of the rap world rather than apart from it.

Just Blaze’s guitar and horns assault gives Ghostface something to yell over, and he transforms the vague “I’m better than you guys” slog into a universally potent threat. It’s a boast song that’s so good, it sounds like a diss track, and it’s the best once I can think of since Jay-Z’s “The Takeover.”

Ghostface’s ear for detail, his absolute sensory overload, and his unflagging energy can best be compared to Martin Scorcese’s films, big works with all the momentum of a freight train and none of the weight.

Whether Ghostface is waxing nostalgic about how kids today have it easy or whether flirting at a bus stop goes awry, “Fishscale” is a work of unabashed, unsentimental love, and a complex and fully formed work of art. Ghostface raps on “The Champ” that “this is architect music / I’m a verbal street opera.” Well said.