Album Review: Legal Drug Money (1996)

Once upon a time in the Southeastern region of Queens, New York, boyz were lost. More than a generation removed from a movement filled with symbolic marches and heartfelt speeches, these boyz took the to the streets of their disappointingly unchanged communities—Francis Lewis and Guy R. Brewer, Springfield and Farmers. Fueled by anger, hungry and ignored, they desperately painted their neighborhood with reds and blues and blacks and greens, paisleys and graffiti.
This mural, painted by adept young Afro-Caribbean artisans, exploded out from the intersection of Parsons and Archer to the edges of the Cross Island and the Belt. The images depicted were of violence, crime, sexuality, pain, horror, salvation, spirituality; all interwoven into an aesthetic representing that richly convoluted tapestry of being a economically troubled minority and therefore lost in American society of the nineties.
In 1996, Spigg Nice, Mr. Cheeks, Freaky Tah and Pretty Lou stood tall on top of a soapbox of tape cassettes stacked high on 165th street and Jamaica, on top of WQHT Hot 97.1’s pervasively urban broadcast strength, on top of an American music culture that’d recently embraced hip-hop as a commercially viable product, and together they represented the Lost Boyz by eloquently narrating the mural they’d been embedded within.
Legal Drug Money is often overlooked in the best-of rankings and listings of the casual hip-hop observer. I emphatically wish to argue that this is simply because instead of being most influential, the Lost Boyz were impeccably influenced. Instead of being timeless, Legal Drug Money is excruciatingly 1996 Jamaica, Queens, NY. But importantly, in being so Legal Drug Money expounds upon a narrative of similarly lost peoples of the past, and likewise foreshadows the sentiment of communities that in too many ways remain lost in the decades that follow.
In just under 71 minutes, these four Boyz inspire, educate and meticulously chronicle the lifestyles of those who seek to be rich, albeit shamelessly. Even going as far as to rebuke Mark Wahlberg and those like him who seek to emulate and imitate the stylings of the community that births Lost Boyz:
Some whites talk peace
But they ain't ready for the planet
Marky Mark (Oh, the nineties) be talkin that slang
But he don't even understand it…
[Track 13, Channel Zero]
But in vice and in virtue, in commercialism and in controversy, in stark misogyny and in heart wrenching odes to loves lost, in desperate lifestyle sustaining criminal activity and in prominent recreational drug use, the lyricism and production quality never wavers from its gritty on-point delivery dynamic. Each track carefully balances on an artful tightrope between the angry rebelliousness of the NWA and the conscious optimism of Tribe Called Quest. Just like the hyper-energized chants of Freaky Tah backgrounding almost every song, many find it difficult to digest the content of this album because it’s the party soundtrack…after the kegs been tapped and the cops have started with the citations and handcuffs. I invite all 20,000 of my brothers then to have another helping, or feast for the first time to the sounds of LB’s finest up in 'dis piece.