Ever since they won the Oscar, the Three 6 Mafia dudes have been on a fast train to cheeseball-ville. With the Crunchy Black defection, the unbearably degrading MTV reality show, and the Good Charlotte collabo, it's tough to reconcile today's attention-hungry goofballs with the unruly, demonic fight-music mob that emerged out of Memphis not all that long ago. But they'll always have one thing that ties them to their hard-as-bones past, and that one thing is Project Pat.
Project Pat is Juicy J's brother, which ties him forever to half of the Three 6 nucleus. But Pat wouldn't know how to begin turning himself approachable. In 2001, he went to prison on gun possession charges only a few months after scoring his first and only solo hit. Since he got out in 2005, he's quietly churned out three solo albums, each harder and darker than the last. Real Recognize Real is his hardest and darkest album yet, and with apologies to 2002's Layin' da Smack Down, it's probably his best.
Pat doesn't sound tough, exactly, and he doesn't need to. He sounds eerie, and that's what makes his gun-talk resonate. His voice is a sort of detuned singsong squeak. His delivery is playful, but not in a friendly way. He rolls his syllables around in his mouth before spitting them out. For a few bars at a time, he'll try on a mocking playground melody or a horror-movie stage-whisper. He pronounces stuff wrong on purpose. He says stuff that doesn't make any sense: "I'm more North Memphis than some dog food up ya nose." On 2007's "Bull Frog Yay", he interrupted a track about dealing coke to chirp "Ribbit!" a bunch of times on the hook. Those oddball hiccups he throws into his flow only serve to underline the absolute control he flexes over his vocal meter, and on something like his masterful guest verse on 8Ball & MJG's "Relax & Take Notes", he manages to best two amazing bulldozer rappers by staying just somehow off, keeping his voice flickering in the shadows.
After a quick skit, Real Recognize Real opens with a thick, luxuriant sample of the O'Jays' "Listen to the Clock on the Wall", slowed down and distended on some classic Memphis soul-rap shit. Pat sounds great over those languorous horn bleats and looped-up coos, but it's a red herring. The album really starts a track later, on "Slick Hater", when DJ Paul and Juicy J (who produced this entire album just like they produce every Project Pat album) bury a peal of malevolent laughter under inspirational 1980s sports-movie synths, turning in one of the air-sucked-out gothic stomps they can still somehow create at will. All the track's little synth-bits interlock together into an overwhelming steamroller of a track, and Pat just tears it to pieces. His threats are so vivid and disturbing and oddly specific that they sort of become funny, the way it's funny when Jason squeezes somebody's head so his eyeball pops out at the camera: "Snatch the panties off these lames like I would do a ho/ .44 revolver, barrel up the booty hole."
From there, Pat's off. On "Bang Smack", he and fellow sui generis freaky libertine Gucci Mane trade faded verses over evocative keyboard wobbles, Pat comparing sex-noises to (seriously) a plunger. On "Ain't Scared of Ya", Pat makes boing-boing sound effects immediately after threatening to kick your mother in the face. On "Choppa to Ya Dome": "I'm a gorilla, so I always shoot banana clips/ Torpedoes coming out my gun, tearing ya ligaments." At some point during the recording process, Pat must've watched The Wizard of Oz; he talks about foes "dying like the Wicked Witch" on "Catch a Hot One" (they're melting?), and then, two tracks later, he's getting brain like he went to see the Wizard. That weird combination of violence and hilarity is serious full-immersion stuff, and the way he bounces his voice around Paul and Juicy's hall-of-mirrors production, that immersion becomes just about irresistible. Nobody does aggro simmer like this guy, and when I'm in the right mood, I can't imagine listening to anyone else.
