Ghetto Street Funk

Taken on its own, the first album by College Park, Georgia’s MCA debut is a solid-if-unspectacular debut. For a Southern rap record, it feels like it’s still searching for a unique sonic identity, looking out one eye towards Quik-conversant West Coast g-funk (“Manifest”; “Milk”) and out the other up north to the murky jazz-gone-raw sounds of boom-bap practitioners like DITC (“Da Boom”; “Maniac”). And its lyrical core — Mello, KP, and Big Reese — rap like Atlanta’s geographical position on the East Coast necessitates toning down the drawl and spitting like Das EFX. But listen with the future in mind, and it suddenly clicks: this is Dungeon Family in prototype, the first glimmers of a sound that Organized Noize would nurture to fruition on OutKast’s Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik the following year. If that makes Ghetto Street Funk feel a bit lacking in comparison to the decade’s worth of ATL-sound revolution it kicked off, its status as a fascinating progenitor makes up for it — and at 45 minutes, with only a couple unintrusive skits, it’s too efficient for bullshit. Subsequent P.A. albums Straight No Chase and My Life, Your Entertainment are more characteristically Dirty South, but it’s still worth hearing the genesis that led to so many revelations.