You would be forgiven if the first couplet had you fooled. On “Iron Man,” the opening song from Supreme Clientele 2—the titles of two masterpieces leveraged, diminished, thrown into the SEO fire—Ghostface Killah headfakes like he really has something. “The stamp on the dope was Ronald Reagan with fronts,” he raps, the kind of absurdist and hyperspecific detail that dotted the crime vignettes from the illustrious first half of his career. “My man ran over his legs, all we heard was the crunch,” the last word accentuated by Foley work you might have heard in a 1950s radio play. It’s enough to recall the rumbling Jeeps, spilled tartar sauce, and glass caskets that launch his oddest, most engrossing stories.
That the rest of “Iron Man,” and the rest of Supreme Clientele 2, falls far short of this standard should not be a surprise; it’s an extraordinary image. And the album is certainly not the nadir for late-period Ghost, who over the last decade has frequently sounded strained and depleted, and who has spent significant time of late writing in staid formats that are poor vehicles for his once phantasmagoric style. It’s sturdy, at times truly fun. But this is also an album that—even when stripped of cynical readings of its commercial proposition and taken on its terms as a creative work—is doomed by the backwards gaze that doubles as its premise.
The one thing that prevents the Reagan-with-fronts line from sounding as if it could be lifted from the original Supreme Clientele is the voice in which it’s delivered. Whether the result of marathon nightclub tours, working with different engineers in new recording software, or simply aging, the “Tasmanian Devil who knows where you can get PCP” vibe of Ghost’s youth is gone, replaced by something gruffer, scratchier, more evocative of your blowhard uncle. Compounding those qualitative changes is the decision, not uniform but frequent enough across SC2, to double his vocals. This all has the effect of making Ghost’s music sound the one thing it never did before: effortful.
From 1995 through 2006—that would be Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… through Fishscale and the wildly underrated More Fish—Ghost was the most singular writer in hip-hop, perhaps in its history. The verses could be dense, even labyrinthine, but all carried the energy of ecstatic, impulsive imagination. In the 2010s and early ’20s, this has been replaced by a flood of painfully ordinary material that includes a pair of LPs with Adrian Younge, a half-baked concept record on Tommy Boy, and a smattering of forgettable single-producer collaborations. In addition to the thinning out of his syntax, Ghost’s narrative writing drifted toward longform character sketches scrubbed of nearly all eccentricity and mapped onto predictable plot beats.
This rigidification mirrors that of one of Ghost’s greatest contemporaries: Nas, whose King’s Disease series and its offshoots have been celebrated by those starved for comfort food. Supreme Clientele 2 is Ghost’s second release for Nas’ Mass Appeal Records, which is making a push to corner the market on nostalgia for ’90s New York. SC2 is part of the label’s “Legend Has It” series, which also includes the Slick Rick and Raekwon albums from this year and will purportedly feature new (or “new”) work from De La Soul, Big L, Mobb Deep, and Nas himself. In 2009, Rae actually justified dubbing an album the sequel to OB4CL, deepening the grooves of the original and forging forward in time. By contrast, Ghost’s invocation of his magnum opus has the unmistakable air of desperation.
In fact, its heavy-handedness drags down otherwise solid material. Certain passages in lead single “Rap Kingpin” actually approach the barrage-of-abstraction feel of SC1, but the “Mighty Healthy” sample shatters any illusion that might otherwise take hold. Why sample a radically superior song of your own—especially if there’s no intertextual play between the two records? Ghost is trading here on the thrill of recognition alone.
His brilliance as a writer aside, the first half of Ghost’s catalog is such a joy to listen to because his love of music is so apparent. On Ironman he channels the spirit of the blaxploitation soundtracks RZA was mining; later he would adopt the pose of the avant-garde artist who secretly wanted to be a lounge singer, drawing on the funk and soul of his youth to command tracks in the spirit of their source material—to go beyond mere recognition. There is a degree to which Supreme Clientele 2 turns that keen eye for recreation, for the first time, toward hip-hop. “Break Beats” and “Beat Box,” slotted back to back near the album’s middle, reach for a neo-1986 sense of earnestness they can’t quite embody. But as their titles suggest, it’s important to Ghost and Mass Appeal that the intention is clear.
