Top five reasons (amongst many others) why Ghostface Killah’s Supreme Clientele is among the best hip-hop albums of our current decade:
1. Ghost rhymes “big microphone hippie” with “Poughkeepsie,” probably the first person in the world to ever couple these words. Never mind that they wouldn’t rhyme had anybody else said them. Never mind that he outshines almost every other MC on the planet with this couplet. However, you may want to take into account that this all comes within 15 seconds of his first verse on the record. Kinda makes “It’s gettin’ hot in here/ So take off all your clothes” seem like it was written by a five-year-old, doesn’t it?
2. The man knows how to pick beats. A perfect example of his now-trademark cherry-picking: jacking Inspectah Deck’s self-produced beat for “Elevation” for his own “Stay True,” immortalized by the original tracklisting where it’s called (what else?) “Deck’s Beat.” Even since Supreme Clientele, Ghost has continued to display the ability to sift through filler and pick out only the hottest shit, whether it’s stealing a simple loop or calling in a proper collection of should-be higher-profile producers, like Juju of the Beatnuts for “One.” The majority of Wu solo albums were unable to accomplish this same feat after 1997, although they certainly tried (see Raekwon’s Immobilarity and GZA’s Beneath the Surface).
3. “Who Would You Fuck” is the best hip-hop skit ever made, bar none. And it only gets funnier with age. Every guy has conversations with buddies about famous women they would sleep with. But this team is the first to put it on an album, which makes it all the better for treading the line between stupidity and brilliance. It sounds like the crew just decided to press record when they were up late smoking blunts and drinking beers, talking about things guys talk about. Naomi or Tyra Banks? Nia or Halle Berry? Ahh, the wonders of hypothetical sex.
4. Raekwon talks all kinds of shit about a pre-fame 50 Cent on the “Clyde Smith” skit. In hindsight, his recognition of 50’s controversial “How To Rob” street hype seems to be a prophetic way of decrying media stunts in the current hip-hop mainstream. Perhaps to avoid too much drama, Rae’s voice is rendered unrecognizable, but heads have come to realize that it was indeed he who says, “I don’t even know why he tried to do that dumb-ass shit right there.” Still, the whole situation provides a subdued counterpoint to the overblown Game/Fiddy G-Unot nonsense that has inexplicably dominated message boards for the past few years.
5. Endless slang invention. For kids in the suburbs, Supreme Clientele is like hieroglyphics; it takes years of training to figure out how to translate it. It would be easy to equate his rhymes on this album to the works of a poet, but Ghost is no Wordsworth or Frost. He speaks in a highly encoded language, coming across as completely alien on first listen, but if you pick apart his verses, they make profound sense in small portions, as if he were spitting clear stream-of-consciousness thoughts straight from his brain. Slowly but surely, the listener is able to put his stories together, figuring out something new every time they listen. This isn’t just poetry; these are street puzzles, God. For real.