ARTIST: Chamillionaire
TITLE: Ultimate Victory
WEB DEBUT: Sept. 6, 2007
RELEASE DATE: Sept. 18, 2007

ONE-LISTEN VERDICT: Ultimate Victory, supposedly Cham’s well-deserved lap after finally hitting it big with “Ridin’ Dirty,” flounders on two key points. One is that it’s the first album by an established artist with a longtime underground following to really show the detrimental effect the rinky-dink ringtone novelty headbanging of “Party Like A Rock Star” and its grade-z thrift store drum machine/wanky “guitar” hook/Wayne-and-Garth lyrical lolz may have on rap as a whole in the near future. There are no less than three songs that rap out with their cock out to Commodore 64 hair metal riffs, one of which is even called “Rock Star.” Another samples (heaven help us) Europe’s “The Final Countdown.” (Those Bonde Do Role kids must feel so sad they don’t have Cham’s label’s deep pockets.)

The other reason is that, as the massively popular and faintly embarassing “Hip-Hop Police” has proven, Cham is someone whose honest intention of being seen by Amerikkka a deep-thinking, sociological type of cat tends to lag behind his ability to make, you know, an informed, cogent argument that goes beyond inane grandstanding. And unfortunately he’s in political spokesperson mode on much of Ultimate Victory. Here’s just a sampling from the righteously retarded “The Evening News,” possibly the longest bout of purposefully “shocking,” misinformed, and just plain puzzling rap rhetoric since Jadakiss’ “Why?”:

“Crocidile Hunter got stung/ And the lion turned on the lion tamer/ We keep sending troops to Iraq/ I figure that we must like danger.”

“OJ was named innocent/ He got no sentence/ He’s still alive/ It’s ver-ry ironic/ That the lawyer that defended him/ Had to die.”

“The white house is gonna stay white/ Even though we know Obama’s black.”

If Chuck D wasn’t suffering from permanent agita over Flavor Flav’s post-millennial antics, then he’s surely popping the Pepto now. But the above mush is trumped in the song’s final moments with Cham’s (blogger dissing??) pop culturally tardy kiss-off:

“Anyways, there’s way more/Important stuff/ That we can discuss/ N*sync/ Making the Band/ And Milli Vanilli have broken up.”

Dude, I know it’s not necessarily the kind of knowledge you want to broadcast to the world, but Milli Vanilli’s been “broken up” for some time. R.I.P. Rob Pilatus.

THE BEST TRACK: On the other hand, those are just the musical/lyrical boners that slapped me in the face on the first few spins. Unless you think any possible Bush diss is a good thing, Cham’s more…traditional gangsta material can be pretty top-notch, if a bit rote. The guitars (and otherwise) on most of the beats are thankfully closer to Houston hip-hop’s typically woozy organs, wobbly horn charts, and hazy blues riffs than sub-Slash bullshit. (Speaking of which: Has no rapper really tried to sample the whistling from “Patience” yet? Surely I seriously doubt I’m the first person to have had this brainstorm.) Particularly good is the backing on the Bun B collaboration “Pimp Mode”: a slo-mo drum machine and new age-y, quiet storm-y guitar playing softcore counterpoint to the track’s recycled pimp-shit lyrics. (Hey, at least they’re using a guitar for something other than channeling Cinderella.) With a little pruning to get rid of the rocking-out dead wood, it might grow on me yet.