Thugs Are Us  (Audio CD) 
by Trick Daddy

On the skit that opens his third album, Thugs Are Us, Liberty City's thug prince, Trick Daddy, converses with a youngster smoking on the street corner, who seems to have taken his music a little too seriously. "Don't be like me nigga, be yourself," he advises the corrupted minor. Cue "I'm a Thug," where an angelic chorus of streetwalkers sympathizes sweetly as the slurry MC drawls an affirmation of his ghetto identity. The remainder of the album features a predictable but engaging trunk of funk that soundtracks Trick Daddy's cartoonish pimp exploits. It runs from the James Brown-jacking "Take It to the House" to the 1980s New Wave swoosh of "Noodles" and the loved-up gangsta sounds of "N-Word." "Where You From" rotates with a robotic voice and a satisfactory thump, and features an appearance from Daddy's "little goil," Trina. And when she opens her mouth, out spill filthy rhymes galore. She returns on "For All My Ladies," a ghetto version of "Independent Woman" cut to a holler of "Get Money!!" But Trick blows the emancipation proclamation by preceding it with a version of Ice-T's "99 Problems," a list of all the tricky women in his little black book of rhymes. Times may change but Trick Daddy's doesn't. --Chris Campion