Flak Magazine: Sir Mix-A-Lot's Daddy's Home, 09.10.03

Offhand, there are a couple of possibilities: Mix dives back in with the randy humor and old-school beats that won a Grammy in 1992, throwing in guest vocals from just about anyone, be they Lil' Bow Wow or Lil' Kim, and delivering a 60-odd minute rave; or, as he claims he's doing, he comes back through the side door with a reinvented sound, claiming a new, perhaps more sophisticated audience. Unfortunately, Daddy's Home, Sir Mix-A-Lot's first album since 1996, is neither a party you'd kill to be at nor a considered, quality work in the vein of OutKast's Stankonia. Making things worse, the one thing you'd expect from a Sir Mix-A-Lot comeback — humor, no matter how sophomoric — is conspicuously absent.

Regardless of whether he likes it, "Baby Got Back," the absurdly popular 1991 paean to women with big butts, is the story of Sir Mix-A-Lot's career. (And he does not like it: On "Y'all Don't Know," one of the album's better tracks, he raps, "Don't believe the one-hit wonder shit/ 'Cause before 'Baby Got Back' Mix was rich.") Mix had options: His first two albums, 1988's Swass and the following year's Seminar, were ripe with boasts about cars, sexual prowess and street cred, but that wasn't all. Mix also showed an interest in political rap. Seminar's "National Anthem" addressed topics as far-ranging as drugs, Vietnam, Iran-contra and the continuing blight of racism in America.

While not exactly Chuck D, Sir Mix-A-Lot was — and is — an intelligent man, and he made a business decision to forego lyrics like "the president is the dope man's friend" in favor of "so your girlfriend rolls a Honda/ playing workout tapes by Fonda/ but Fonda ain't got a motor in the back of her Honda." Mack Daddy, released in 1991, was a comic-rap hit album. Sir Mix-A-Lot became a star, but he couldn't repeat the formula, and he got in trouble with the IRS to boot. Mix left the scene after 1996's Return of the Bumpasaurus, but he promises that his return is not old-school irrelevance, that his flow has been upgraded and that he is breaking new ground. "It's not the same bullshit you hear from every MC," he says in the press release accompanying review copies of the album.

He's right, to an extent. Sir Mix-A-Lot is a better vocalist than the majority of rappers working today. (He doesn't need a lot of guest rappers, and he doesn't use them.) He's improved immensely since Mack Daddy — his slightly nasal quality has given way to a deeper growl. And Mix wrings meaning out of every word he raps, using colors in his voice with which other performers simply don't bother. It lends bravado to even the most pedestrian lines in his songs. On "Y'all Don't Know," his phrasing on a single word, "spurs," is absolutely hilarious. He's like an impeccably trained Shakespearean actor, imbuing each song with a sense of theatricality and drawing the listener's attention to the joy in the performance. (It's a pleasant contrast to the vitriol and played-out whining of Eminem.)

It's a shame the songs behind Mix's words aren't better. Some of them — "Y'all Don't Know," a chronicle of the fast life and hard times of the rapper, has a great groove augmented by a cheesy '80s-era guitar lick. The opening track, "Daddy's Home," announces Mix-A-Lot's return with blasts of synthesized strings and the rapper revved up, promising "daddy's home — and I'm collecting on the rent."

Mix-A-Lot has said he honed the new material in clubs, and that might explain the confidence and energy in his inflection. But how to explain the material, which declines with each track? "Game Don't Get Old" tries to illustrate the cost of overweening ambition, but the lyrics are too trite to be effective. ("I got no kids because of it/ and I got no wife because of it...," etc.) "Party Over Here" wants to be just that, but take a look at the chorus: "Party over here/ you are over there/ we gonna make you bounce, shake your derriere." The odd literalness is hardly the stuff to inspire derriere shaking.

"Big Johnson" is a sad miscalculation. A female chorus reveals, over and over, in a single unornamented melody line, that they really "like a great big Johnson," while Sir Mix-A-Lot tells us that even though he's not well-endowed, "That's OK, you call me Big Daddy anyway/ and make me feel good/ About my medium wood." It wants to be this album's "Baby Got Back," but it lacks that song's modicum of wit, not to mention a groove.

Despite its confidence-bolstering effects, maybe Mix's vetting his songs in clubs is part of the problem. Possibly he feared losing the crowd early and wanted to make an immediate impact. So, instead of offering thoughtful lyrics that address contemporary concerns both political and social, or easing the audience into a new sound with trademark humor, he keeps the beats simple and the raps simpler. That's what the album sounds like: lyrics for dullards, a dumbing-down to reach as many people as possible. A sit-com rap album.

— Christopher Hickman (hickatz at mindspring dot com)