Goodie Mob - World Party (December 21, 1999)

Once upon a time, there was a rap crew out of Atlanta, Georgia, that was known for two things: their affiliation with a duo named Outkast, and their socially conscious lyrics that made one think about the world we are living in. That rap crew was called the Goodie Mob, and it consisted of four members, Khujo, T-Mo, Big Gipp, and Cee-Lo, their de facto leader.

Their first two albums, Soul Food and Still Standing, earned them record industry plaques to hang on their label office walls, and they garnered a small but loyal fan base who would hang on to their every word. And the group did not disappoint: those first two albums, combined with their sporadic guest appearances on Outkast albums and other outside projects, all proudly carried the Goodie legacy.

So when it came time for album number three, an obvious query was made: what if, instead of writing more socially conscious songs, the four men try to appeal to the mainstream with songs deliberately recorded for the radio and the clubs? While it is unknown who exactly decided that was the direction to go (my chips are on the record label), the Goodie Mob's World Party was created to appeal to an audience that, at this point, didn't even know they existed. To do this, outside producers were sought out to provide more mainstream musical backing for the crew, although the usual players (Organized Noize, Mr. DJ, the Goodie themselves) were able to fight for scraps.

Clearly the group wasn't too happy about the new direction, or at least one member wasn't: Cee-Lo, long considered to be the breakout star, performs on the project to the best of his ability, but abruptly left the group to pursue a solo career, and did so during the recording process, which may help explain why World Party only consists of fourteen tracks, only twelve of which are actual songs, making this their shortest album yet.

World Party was released in 1999, one year after Still Standing, to mediocre reviews, poor sales, and, curiously, mild radio spins, so that aspect of the project did actually work as they had intended. However, down to three members, the Goodie Mob continued to push through, electing to record a fourth disc without one of their key members, and Cee-Lo moved on to a solo career that, thus far, seems to have been capped off by his work with Gnarls Barkley.

A good postscript to that tale is that Cee-Lo and the Goodie Mob have since reunited this year, and are planning at least one reunion concert and, hopefully, another album.

But this post is about the crappy World Party. (Fuck, I gave the ending away!)

1. INVITATION TO THE WORLD PARTY
La La, the former radio deejay and MTV veejay who is now best known as Carmello Anthony's baby's mother and one of the players on VH-1's Charm School (which just makes me sad), provides a bilingual intro that guaran-fucking-tees that World Party will not meet your high level of expectations at all.

2. WORLD PARTY
The hook borrows liberally from Lionel Richie's "All Night Long", which I fucking love, I shit you not, but that fact alone should inform you two that "World Party" explores different terrain than the previous two Goodie Mob projects. The Organized Noize production is repetitive and appears to be aiming for a club atmosphere, but the lyrics are all vintage Goodie. Save for the hook, of course.

3. CHAIN SWANG
The beat, which is credited to Coptic, Derrick Trotman, and D-Dot (one of Bad Boy's Hitmen and the the guy who also portrayed The Madd Rapper for that label's 1990s projects), provides a dark environment for the brothers Goodie to establish their habitat, and it sounds really goddamn good, if a bit repetitive. However, due to that repetitive nature, one is left with the feeling, for the first time, that the beat was not specifically crafted for the group: they merely purchased the instrumental for their own sordid purposes. As such, this song is good, but nowhere near great.

4. GET RICH TO THIS / PARKING LOT (BREAK) (FEAT BACKBONE & BIG BOI)
Before today's listening experience to prep for the post, the last time I heard this track was while I was perusing a crappy gift shop on the Las Vegas Strip. (No, not the one that claims to be the world's largest.) True fact: the cashier was blasting this from his iPod speakers, and I remember thinking, "Of all the Goodie Mob songs, this is the one you like?" However stupid this shit is (and it is really ignorant, almost offensively so), this still ends up being catchy as hell, so although the Goodie themselves may not be the biggest fans of it, the song is a mild success. Also, is there a better theme song to have stuck in your head while walking through the hotels on the Strip? Special guest star Big Boi (from Outkast) is accustomed to this kind of subject matter, so he sounds just fine, but Cee-Lo sounds befuddled and his verse comes off as entirely unnatural. Not much of a call for social change on here, you see, but it's still kind of entertaining.

5. THE DIP
I couldn't get into this one at all. The vocals all seem to blend in with the beat, which usually isn't a good thing for what is ostensibly a rap song.
6. ALL A'S (FEAT BACKBONE)
Mr. DJ's upbeat instrumental brings back the high energy of "Get Rich To This", but this song is much worse. Backbone's first verse, especially, is awful, Cee-Lo's is almost comically violent, and Khujo throws in some good old-fashioned homophobia for no good reason. Cee-Lo also seems to sound embarrassed to be performing on the hook.

7. WHAT IT AIN'T (GHETTO ENUFF) (FEAT TLC)
Even though both acts called LaFace Records their label home, I always thought this this collaboration was not organic at all (unlike the earlier work TLC did with Outkast). Just who exactly were the brothers Goodie trying to impress with this duet of sorts? It also doesn't help much that this comes off as more of a TLC song featuring the Goodie Mob than the other way around. The only rapper that sounds decent over this faux-futuristic beat is Left Eye (R.I.P.).

8. I.C.U. (FEAT SLEEPY BROWN)
The Organized Noize beat isn't bad, and the Goodie sound a hell of a lot more comfortable on here than they did on the last song. However, nothing here sticks to your bones like a "Cell Therapy" or a "Dirty South".

9. REBUILDING
The instrumental is credited to both D-Dot and his apprentice, a young Kanye West, but I have it on good authority that 'Ye handled the beat all by himself and The Madd Rapper added his name to help the sale, not unlike what Dr. Dre and Timbaland do. This is actually really fucking good: this is the closest World Party has come to sounding like uncompromising Dungeon Family music. And they had to turn to a guy who President Barack Obama would later call a jackass to get to that sound. Weird.

10. JUST DO IT / POOCHIE (BREAK)
Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me.

11. STREET CORNER (FEAT BACKBONE & JOI)
Meh.
12. CUTTY BUDDY (FEAT SLEEPY BROWN)
Of all the topics I never wanted to hear the Goodie rhyme about, the concept of a friend with benefits (or a fuck-buddy) was close to the top of the list, especially since Mike Jones later mastered this subject matter in the new millennium. (Ah, sarcasm.) The crew are entitled to have a little fun with their music, and they can certainly have their sexual healing, but I don't ever need to hear them talk about it, especially when Cee-Lo sounds as if he had to down eighteen shots of Patron in order to spit his verse out. This is just weird.

13. FIE FIE DELISH
Easy Mo Bee (three days in a row!) provides the beat: that guy sure gets around, doesn't he? It's always interesting when the Goodie Mob journeys out of their comfort zone (such as when they work with DJ Muggs), but they all seem to be overwhelmed by the instrumental, especially Cee-Lo, who, surprisingly, turns in one of his worst performances to date. It's entirely possible that he had already checked out of the group mentally at this point, but still.

14. GO BACK (BREAK)
This is just a rap album outro, and a relatively forgettable one at that.

FINAL THOUGHTS: While not as bad as most critics claimed it to be a decade ago, the Goodie Mob's World Party still sucks camel dicks. The balloons aren't properly inflated and they're all bunched up in one corner, the drinks are all watered down, the food selection is lacking, the male-to-female ratio isn't favorable at all, and T-Mo, Khujo, Big Gipp, and Cee-Lo all sound as if they're trying too hard. There's nothing inherently wrong with wanting to look past society's ills once in a while so that one could try and have a decent time, but the paradigm shift between Still Standing and World Party is so jarring that most of the crew's fans probably found themselves falling off of a fucking cliff. People look to the Goodie Mob to not hear songs about getting money and promiscuous sex, a fact that the group chose to brazenly ignore. On the plus side, a lot of the instrumentals were interesting, at least, but this World Party should have been cancelled due to inclement weather.

BUY OR BURN? Burn this if you absolutely must. Loyal Goodie Mob enthusiasts will find at least one song to like on here, but liking one song off of a CD with fourteen tracks isn't economically feasible right now.

BEST TRACKS: "Rebuilding"; "Chain Swang"; "Get Rich To This"

-Max

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Other Goodie Mob releases are being discussed here.

Goodie Mob - Still Standing (April 7, 1998)

Wikipedia refers to the Goodie Mob's first album, Soul Food, as an underground classic. Sorry, but I just don't buy it. I have no qualms with the album itself: in fact, when I wrote about their debut back in February 2008 (I really have to work on my follow-through, don't I?), I recommended a purchase. But while Soul Food didn't exactly make stars out of group members Khujo, T-Mo, Big Gipp, and Cee-Lo (mainstream popularity for the singing half of Gnarls Barkley was still a few years away), the album itself sold over half a million copies, and when you sell enough to earn a gold plaque to hold up your wall, you're probably not an underground group. But maybe that's just me.

Their follow-up, Still Standing, was three years in the making. During this time, all four members kept busy with guest appearances on Outkast's ATLiens (although they didn't all appear on the same track), and they even found the time to appear in the ensemble comedy Mystery Men as the "Not So Goodie Mob". It was kind of weird when they popped up like that, but even so, that flick wasn't that bad, now that I think about it.

Still Standing continued with the social consciousness that permeated Soul Food, attaching the group's messages to the beatwork of Organized Noize and Mr. DJ, with assists from Cee-Lo and T-Mo (making their debuts behind the boards) and DJ Muggs from Cypress Hill; the crew returned this particular favor by appearing on "Decisions Decisions", their masterwork from the Muggs solo debut Soul Assassins Chapter One. Although the album comes off as much darker than its predecessor (one glance at the third "o" in the group's name on the album cover reveals the strung-up body of a man, which I'm sure made the folks at LaFace/Arista happy and KMD confused as hell, but I'll get to that story later), unlike their peers in Outkast, who used their second album to send Andre 3000 into space while Big Boi handled pimping from the Earth side of things, Still Standing remained grounded, and, once again, over five hundred thousand copied left store shelves.

I can't imagine this disc moving that many units today, but it's fun to pretend.

1. THE EXPERIENCE
Foregoing the “rap album intro” cliché, the Goodie Mob present Cee-Lo on a solo one-verse spoken word-slash-rap track that starts off sounding like an ode to “Distortion To Static” from The Roots, but turns into a rather angry diatribe regarding race and status. It's not like Soul Food was the happiest album in history or anything, but so far Still Standing sounds fucking pitch black.

2. BLACK ICE (FEAT OUTKAST)
The best Outkast/Goodie Mob collaboration (from a Goodie Mob album, anyway) to include both members of the duo. Its shuffling beat will perk up your eardrums. It even features Andre 3000 on the bass, for fans who are curious about their hero's musical contributions. There's a different version of this track floating around subtitled the "Goodie Mob version", which features all four members of the crew (only three appear on the album track) with different lyrics, and then Andre and Big Boi are thrown back into the mix for good measure, albelt with the same verses as before. Regardless of the version you're fond of, they're both really good.

3. FLY AWAY
Probably not the best way to bridge the gap between “Black Ice” and “The Damm”.

4. THE DAMM (FEAT COOL BREEZE)
This darkly hyper beat pretty much sums up my thoughts on Still Standing: dark and depressing, but with the realization that not everything is as serious as you make it out to be. I found Cool Breeze's cameo to be pretty fucking useless, and the hook becomes tired after hearing it over and over again, but otherwise this song is actually awesome.

5. THEY DON'T DANCE NO MO' (CLEAN) (FEAT LIL' WILL)
The first single from Still Standing was also the first sign that the sound from Soul Food was a thing of the past. It was also a bit of a mistake: although this track is alright, there's nothing here that reallly grabs the listener. “Black Ice” (either version) may have been a better choice, especially with its bankable guest stars. I've always wondered why the censored version of this track ended up being the final version for the album: did the label misplace the original in a stack of papers on Babyface's desk, or was the crew trying to show restraint?

6. BEAUTIFUL SKIN
A good song with a positive message. (Well, to a point, anyway: I understand the encouraging of women to respect themselves, but the fact that Cee-Lo recommends withholding your respect of said women until they meet the prerequisites is more than a bit fucked up.) The anti-littering public service announcement at the end is also a surprise, but also timely, considering the environmental initiative right now.

7. GUTTA BUTTA
Meh.

8. GHETTO-OLOGY (FEAT CHIEFTON)
This shit actually rocks. Musically, you get the feeling that you're watching a car chase sequence from a Jerry Bruckheimer-produced action flick, or maybe even from one of the Jason Bourne movies helmed by Paul Greengrass. All of the rappers fit the harried pace admirably. Nice!
9. DISTANT WILDERNESS
I love the slow-as-Sisyphus-pushing-the-boulder instrumental, especially since it has the added benefit of slowing down time and, curiously, the movement of everyone around you. I wish that Cee-Lo's verse didn't sound as if it were phoned in, but that's my only real gripe.

10. GREENY GREEN (FEAT WITCHDOCTOR)
A good track, but after an hour, you'll just be hungry again.

11. I REFUSE LIMITATION (FEAT BACKBONE)
This is Still Standing's equivalent to Soul Food's “Goodie Bag”, right down to Cee-Lo tying the room together at the end. This track is really good, and the title alone deserves some bonus points.

12. SEE YOU WHEN I SEE YOU
Sounds pleasant enough, but the real draw is its length, which is perfect for those of my readers with short attention spans. The Goodie Mob don't usually adhere to budget limitations in their songs, so this was a surprise.

13. INSHALLAH
Honestly, everybody involved sounded good on this DJ Muggs-produced track, but there wasn't enough on here for me to differentiate it from every other song on Still Standing. Please note that this is not meant to be a negative critique for the song itself.

14. JUST ABOUT OVER
As the album is, actually, just about over (there's only one more track after this one), Goodie Mob decide to bring listeners an out-of-left-field flat-out rock song. (If given a choice, I would have chosen Outkast as the Dungeon Family act most likely to approach rock music first. Huh.) I like Cee-Lo's voice, regardless of genre, because he is capable of making you feel his lyrics. The rest of the crew also adapt nicely on this gem.

15. STILL STANDING
A good way to end an album, I suppose.

FINAL THOUGHTS: Still Standing is actually a really good follow-up album. The four members of Goodie Mob establish consistence with their lyrics over some much darker production work, and even though Cee-Lo is still the only member you'll be able to pick out of a lineup, that doesn't make this album any less entertaining. Big Gipp, T-Mo, and Khujo also show some strong consistency in their lyrical game as well, and the guests don't distract the listener from the main attraction (with the exception of "Black Ice", but come on, that was to be expected). An underrated diamond in the rough.

BUY OR BURN? While you may have some issues locating it in your area, you should definitely buy this shit if you happen across it. The Goodie Mob will appreciate it: maybe with enough royalties from your purchases, they'll actually record another group effort, since the world doesn't really need another Gnarls Barkley record.

BEST TRACKS: “Black Ice”; “I Refuse Limitation”; “Distant Wilderness”; “Just About Over”; “The Damm”; “Ghetto-Ology”; “Beautiful Skin”

-Max

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Goodie Mob - Soul Food

Goodie Mob - Soul Food (November 21, 1995)

First off, the "secret project" involving guest writers is, for the time being, still on, and if you are interested in possibly contributing, please hit me up at the e-mail address on the right, since it's hard for me to respond regarding a "secret project" to a comment. Depending on the level of interest, we'll see how that goes, if it goes. I'll let you know.

Anyway, Goodie Mob. Best known as "the group Cee-Lo was in before Danger Mouse plucked him from obscurity", they were founding members of the Atlanta, Georgia-based collective Dungeon Family, along with production team Organized Noize, the shortlisted-for-Best Rap Group Of All Time Outkast, and some group called Parental Advisory, which, for the life of me, I couldn't recall one of their songs if you put a gun to my head and clubbed a baby seal while wearing lederhosen and rapping "Baby Got Back" in only the harshest German accent while propping my eyelids open, A Clockwork Orange-style, and forcing me to watch a neverending marathon of Hannah Montana and High School Musical, parts one and two. The group consists of the aforementioned Cee-Lo and Big Gipp, who were prominently featured on Outkast's great and still-socially-relavant "Git Up, Git Out", from their debut Southernplayalisticadillacmusik. Between the recording of that song and the sessions for their own debut, Soul Food (released on the same label, LaFace, home of TLC), they added two more members, Khujo and T-Mo, in order to fully commit to that bowling league that Cee-Lo had signed up for just weeks prior.

Soul Food could be considered as a point/counterpoint to Outkast's debut (which I really don't want to type the name of anymore), as its themes of politics, racism, discrimination, and overt paranoia clash directly with Andre and Big Boi's pimptacular songs regarding hoes, partying, and having fun in general. Just like not all of Kast's tracks were "fun", not every single Goodie Mob song dealt with the harsh reality of life in Atlanta, so to everyone that just got scared off by the first sentence of this paragraph, welcome back.

The name "Goodie Mob" can be construed as a bizarre acronym for "The Good Die Mostly Over Bullshit", but I've always felt that was a bit of a stretch. Instead, I choose to believe that the group is a Mafia front for baked goods and candies, which are stolen from the rich and given to the poor, so that their children's teeth can rot right out of their mouths. What can I say, I'm a dick.

Soul Food, from what I recall, sold enough copies to earn a gold plaque from the RIAA, and made an underground star out of Cee-Lo, who would only make his profile more visible with subsequent projects, guest appearances, and, eventually, solo discs, production work on The Pussycat Dolls's breakthrough single "Don't Cha"("breakthrough" meaning "God this song sucks please don't sing it on American Idol anymore goddammit"), and, of course, Gnarls Barkley, whose album St. Elsewhere has moved more units than every single Goodie Mob album combined.

Damn shame, that.

1. FREE
Actually not annoying, for a rap album intro, anyway. But then again, Cee-Lo has one of the most distinctive voices in hip hop, and for the most part, I've always found him enjoyable to listen to (except for the majority of St. Elsewhere, a really fucking overrated album, except for that cover of "Gone Daddy Gone", but I like the Violent Femmes).

2. THOUGHT PROCESS (FEAT DRE A/K/A ANDRE 3000 & JOI)
Personally, I would have gone with an instrumental that featured harder drums as the introductory song on Soul Food, but I guess evoking memories of "Git Up, Git Out" works too. Cee-Lo, who people forget is a damn good rapper, impresses, but Andre swoops in and destroys the track to such a degree that the beat actually runs away, and an attempt at its replication is performed with handclaps that will remind you of 112's "Cupid".

3. RED DOG (FEAT BIG BOI)
This is really just a skit. This will happen a lot on Soul Food.

4. DIRTY SOUTH (FEAT BIG BOI & COOL BREEZE)
I loved this song ever since it was sent out to radio and BET as the third single. Big Boi proves that he's just as good as his partner-in-rhyme Dre in the "showstealing raps" category, but the real question is: What the hell happened to Cool Breeze?

5. CELL THERAPY
The first single, which I dismissed at first as bizarre and awkward, as the video slightly creeped me out. I eventually came around, though, since I remembered the name "Goodie Mob" preceeded by the word "featuring" on "Git Up, Git Out". I also remember wondering where the hell the other two guys came from. My brother and I loved the hook on this track, since it's both ridiculous and terrifying: "Who's that peepin' in my window? BLAOOW! Nobody now!"

6. SESAME STREET
Although the song features a thrilling guest rap by Cookie Monster (C-Mo, bitch!), the hook is weak, and the song ultimately suffers.

7. GUESS WHO
I don't normally like rap songs dedicated to mothers, since I find them sappy and contrived. (I have my reasons, which I won't get into here.) This song is the exception, especially Cee-Lo's verse, which is especially touching when you consider the fact that Soul Food is dedicated to the memory of his late mother.

8. SERENITY PRAYER
Skit.

9. FIGHTING (FEAT JOI)
The beats on Soul Food sound much more organic than on Outkast's first album Runonsentence, as if they were lifted wholesale from a Whole Foods Market by Organized Noize. The overall sound on this disc is probably the reason the second half of ATLiens exists.

10. BLOOD
You may call it a skit, but it's really more of a short song by Thomas "Cee-Lo" Callaway.

11. LIVE AT THE O.M.N.I.
Meh.
12. GOODIE BAG
I don't think this was ever a single, but the first time I heard this song was on the radio. (Oh, the good old days.) Great dark production, and Cee-Lo pulls a Kool G. Rap and rhymes for seemingly eighty-seven minutes during his closing verse.

13. SOUL FOOD (FEAT SLEEPY BROWN & 4.0)
When I was in high school, I frequented used CD stores with much more regularity than I do today, and the section I used to check the most often is the CD Single rack. This is because radio stations around my way would take their promotional discs to the stores, apparently for them to be purchased by me, since I snatched up hundreds of these fuckers. These promo discs usually featured radio edits, call out hooks (you know, for inclusion in your favorite station's commercials for "This week...new music from..."), and, most importantly, instrumentals. (You may have to scan your eyes back upward, toward the title of this post, to realize that I'm talking about a completely different era in hip hop, one where the music played on the radio was good.) Anyway, I didn't pick up Soul Food the day it dropped. (I know, blasphemy, but it happens.) It took me a good while, since I had to wait for "Dirty South" to drop as the third single before I was convinced, and then I waited even longer. But I did pick up the single for "Soul Food", which is probably due to my collector's gene more than anything else, since I never liked this song. I always found it boring, and my opinion of its accompanying video is similar. I'm sure it was released to prove that Goodie Mob wasn't just a quartet of paranoid government-suspecting rappers: they are real human beings that like to have fun and rhyme about comfort foods. But I never accepted that.

14. FUNERAL
Another skit.

15. I DIDN'T ASK TO COME
Although I found the delivery of the lyrics to be kinda weak (maybe they should have been pitched up a bit), the beat knocks.

16. RICO
Yet another skit, this one featuring Rico Wade, one of the production trio Origanized Noize, which also consisted of Sleepy Brown and some guy named Ray Murray who, nevertheless, helped produce some of the best songs generated from Atlanta, even though his name isn't memorable.

17. THE COMING (FEAT WITCHDOCTOR)
Remember how I wrote that I didn't pick up Soul Food until after its release date? I was serious. It was several years before I found the need to own this disc, so it'll make sense when I say that I found Witchdoctor's guest spot annoying as shit, but since my first impression of him was forged by his contribution to the Bulworth soundtrack, "Holiday/12 Scanner" (also from his debut, A S.W.A.T. Healing Ritual), I didn't mind him at all, since I loved that song.

18. CEE-LO
A skit featuring Khujo. Nah, I'm just fucking with ya.

19. THE DAY AFTER (FEAT RONI)
A good enough way as any to end your group's debut album, although I don't care for it.

FINAL THOUGHTS: Soul Food is a better companion piece to Outkast's Irefusetospellthisagain than it is a response. Both albums are enjoyable in their own way, but to be honest, with Outkast, both artists held their own on the mic, and their talents shone like the sun through a paper bag in your grandmother's house. (Not all of these are going to make sense, by the way.) Soul Food, however, left me waiting for more Cee-Lo and Big Gipp verses, mainly because I was already familiar with their vocal work. That is a completely unfair statement regarding Khujo and T-Mo, though; they do solid work on Soul Food, but it's obvious that there is a star in the making on this disc.

BUY OR BURN? I would be remiss if I didn't recommend a purchase. In fact, if enough people read this blog and purchase this disc, maybe it will eventually go platinum and convince Cee-Lo to hook back up with his now-ex-bandmates and release another Goodie Mob project. It can include production from Danger Mouse, I don't give a fuck, but we need to hear another album from this collective.

BEST TRACKS: "Goodie Bag"; "Dirty South"; "Cell Therapy"; "I Didn't Ask To Come"; "Guess Who"

-Max

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