Master P needs lyrical help

By Garth Milan
Summer Forty-Niner

Master P and his No Limit All Stars fall short with their new compilation CD, entitled “Who U Wit?”  The instrumentals, produced primarily by Beats by the Pound, feature some enticing sounds, however, the lyrics suffer from uninventive writing and leave the listener hoping for more. 

The compilation features 18 tracks dealing with basketball.  Executive producer and No Limit owner Master P stands behind the idea of the album, as P is a former professional player for the Charlotte Hornets. 

However, it’s hard to tell that P’s heart is in the album as much as one may think. The lyrics have a serious shallowness that start with the opening track, “B-Ball.”  The song begins with P singing “Basketball is my favorite sport, I like the way they dribble up and down the court.”  This is just a prelude to the meaningless rhymes that the rest of the CD features.

“You Ain’t a Baller” continues the trend of good music with terrible lyrics.  It becomes obvious that artist Magic gets desperate for things to say when he says “It’s the first of the month and I just got paid, so I’m trying to go home to catch a game on the cable.”  Isn’t rap supposed to rhyme?

C-Murder does the same thing on the next song, “B-Ballin On My Block.”  The lack of lyrics and rhymes get so bad that by the end of the song C-Murder doesn’t even attempt to rap, but rather just  babbles into the microphone about how good of a player he is.  Murder even goes as far as to say that NBA legend Michael Jordan should “lay his money on the table” for a game of one-on-one. Unfortunately, the song doesn’t even benefit from having a good beat.

If you’ve tolerated the CD enough to make it to track six, you will be rewarded with Snoop Dogg’s “Hoop Dreams (He Got Game).”  Snoop breaks up the bland lyrics of the previous rappers bragging about their basketball skills by doing what he does best — telling a story.  Snoop tells listeners about having a dream that he was a professional player.  Although it’s far from his best work, at least it interrupts the monotony of the other rappers.  It is refreshing to hear Snoop talking about a dream, rather than to listen to a rapper claim that he has the talent to beat the pros in the NBA. 

Unfortunately, Snoop’s track is not enough to save the disc.  From his song, the CD goes straight downhill.  To top it off, Master P ends the compilation by repeating the first song on the CD not just once, but three times. This brings the total number of times that “B-Ball” is played to four, which is four times too many.