Musicians, writers, artists, fellow humans: Do you struggle with creeping boredom? Do you fight nagging suspicions that you've accomplished your goals and they failed to satisfy you? Do you cast about listlessly for motivation and inspiration in low moments? Have you ever guiltily killed an hour or three on Twitter?
Whoever you are, and whatever your low-grade malaise, E-40 is here to banish it. The Bay Area rap forefather is a human exclamation point, a superhero whose power is remaining helplessly in love with his work. E-40 works harder and more joyfully at making great rap music than you or I have ever worked on anything. Consider: In 2004, Jive Records released Best of E-40: Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow, a compilation surveying a career so packed with highlights that you could quibble about its many omissions. Now, his devoted fans could be forgiven for wanting a "best of" culling from his last six full-lengths. And that would only go back to last year.
At any rate, here we stand, confronted with Welcome to the Soil Pt. 4, 5, and 6, which drop 45 new E-40 songs on the world. These arrive eighteen months after the first three volumes and a year after his double album, History, with Too $hort. Sometimes, contending with E-40's catalog can feel like cowering beneath the business end of a cement mixer. But unlike other prolific Internet-era data-dump rappers, E-40 releases albums without a single half-finished sketch on them, for full retail; his audience pays for this music, all of it, and screams the choruses of the new songs back at him at his shows. He is 46 years old.
To say, then, that these volumes lag ever so slightly behind the first three in color and excitement feels a bit like observing that the 86-year-old man who climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro in his underwear wobbled just a bit before ascending the peak. Nevertheless, the tiny signs of thoughtlessness dotting the expanse of these Soils have to be duly noted: for the first time since he began this double- and triple-album blitzkrieg campaign, he repeats himself from installment to the next, recycling the excellent boast "I'm crispy like Panko" from Pt. 5's "Mister T." to Pt. 6's "Penetrate." Several of the beats on Pt. 4 sound like explicit attempts to recreate "Function", the IAMSU!-featuring breakout hit from from last year.
But that's about it: If you're plumbing for deeper quibbles with this project, stop here. 40's ability to elaborate on his decades-old subject matter hasn't slowed: On Pt. 6's "Project Building", he shows us "hundred round drums that look just like a curled-up snake," and on "Rep Yo District" he tells us the jewels on his neck "look like baby tongues." His details are so specific they nearly hurt your eyes: "Granny bedridden" are his two opening words on "Do What I Gotta Do", a song that also mentions needing to show up at your parole address. A character on "Off The Block" goes to jail "on purpose just so he can get a decent meal." In the middle of the hard-knock-life mob number "Throwed Like This", he throws in that his family uses "a broom, not a vacuum, for the carpet." Who else in rap currently scrutinizes the meaning of their environment that closely?
There are a lot of guests sitting across the huge banquet table, helping themselves to E-40's inexhaustible energy. Danny Brown and Schoolboy Q show up on "All My Ni**az"; Rick Ross (who offers the #peakRoss quote: "My jacket's expensive/ It's made out of lizards") and French Montana (who offers the #peakMontana: "Can't you see I'm high? Stop talking in my ear") on "Champagne". Houston legend Z-Ro drops in, sounding spectacular on "In Dat Cup". The spread of Bay Area artists half E-40's age or less is impressive, as always: Roach Gigz, J Stalin, Kool John, Young Bari, Decadez. They reinforce E-40's timelessness and his continued relevance; he might be one of the few rappers in the world with 12-year-old fans as fervent as his 40-year-old ones.
Accordingly, a sizeable chunk of the production comes from new artists who listened to E-40 when they were three years old. The North Hollywood-based rapper/producer Decadez offers a spare, rubbery take on mob music on "Yellow Gold"; Flint, Michigan producer World Famous D-Boy locates some synth tones so low and menacing on "Got That Line" they threaten to set off nearby car alarms playing in your earbuds. Old and new styles coexist comfortably in 40's music in a way they don't elsewhere: The most audaciously "off"-sounding beat on the project, Pt. 6's "In A Bucket", comes from Rick Rock, one of the producers credited with pioneering hyphy. Try to pick out a beat and guess which generation of Bay Area rap it comes from and you will be wrong half the time: In E-40's Bay, the classic stuff sounds avant-garde, and vice versa.
As he always has, E-40 tosses in a few "state of the world today" songs. They slow the momentum, but compensate through charm—on "Home Again", he frets about his niece and nephew's college loans, and on "Don't Shoot The Messenger" he reminisces about keeping "a Vallejo Times Herald paper route to help pay the bills." This specificity is the source of joy in E-40's music, the reason it never grows stale or formulaic. Making great rap music is a reason to live for E-40, and might very well sustain him through his sixties. Doing what you love, and doing it fiercely well, is a fountain of youth.
