All the Wu like to bask in gansta rap’s infatuation with urban machismo, but Ghostface Killah embraces it with a rare gusto. Borrowing an alter ego from one of the Marvel Universe’s wealthiest denizens, Ghost often depicts himself as a powerful, ruthless drug kingpin and, most recently, has upped the ante by affording himself a comic book backstory and supernatural powers, to boot. But if the majority of Ghost’s street-hardened tales exist primarily in the realm of wish-fulfillment, “Walk Around,” from Big Doe Rehab is something else entirely.
In the song, Ghost plays the part of a would-be gangster who finds his entire life turned upside-down after he kills a man over an altercation with Ghost’s girlfriend. The body count of a GFK album often rivals that of a latter-day Tarantino film; enemies are dispatched ruthlessly and often with devilish creativity. Yet this time, after shooting his adversary three times at close range — two in the stomach and a coup de grace to the dome — Ghostface says “Everything got real slow, I ain’t hear shit, my word/ At least 40 seconds I stay dead stiff.” It’s entirely possible that the cops could have found him frozen in that grisly tableaux, but a friend takes the gun out of his hand and whisks him away in a car. In subsequent verses, the consequences of this rash and bloody deed will begin to seek him out, but seemingly more than anything else, it’s the sheer enormity of his actions that haunt Ghostface. He pukes in his friend’s car and later tries fruitlessly to wash the blood out of his clothing, all the while the memory of what he’s done plays over and over in his mind.
Slowly, Ghost’s world closes in around him. The police start raiding his spots, making life a living hell for his family. He’s pursued by his own connects who, sensing weakness, try to shake him down for more money. Ghost is bounced from safehouse to safehouse; his friends try to convince him to flee to Tennessee, but he clings to his increasingly transparent gangster facade, saying “No, I got these two snow-bunnies in Venice Beach.” By the end of the song, Ghost is a caged animal, asphyxiating from his cloistered existence and raving about his intentions to go out in a violent standoff with the police.
Ghostface is famous for his frenetic delivery, and there’s no more perfect vehicle to showcase it than “Walk Around.” It features a tense, claustrophobic narrative, and Ghost invests it with kilowatts of paranoid energy, his lyrics practically tripping over one another. The jitteryness of Ghost’s verses strikes a sharp contrast to Anthony Acid’s smooth soul beat, sampled liberally from Little Milton’s “Packed up and Took my Mind.” Severed from its original context, the song’s opening lines evoke Ghost’s sense of dislocation and help to complete the picture of a man who has suddenly and unexpectedly reached the end of his tether. This is one of Ghost’s most vivid tracks, the work of a master storyteller operating at the top of his game.
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