"I'm gonna keep it all-the-way hood; I been livin' in my third childhood lately/ Smokin' a lot of spinach lately, hanging out at the strip club lately." E-40 said this on 2010's "Undastandz Me", from his massive Revenue Retrievin' double album, and the line's a clue to the tremendous life force powering his miraculous late-career renaissance. There's a lot in it: rueful, grown-folks honesty, a helpless embrace of sensual pleasures. But mostly, there is irrepressibility, a simple inability to stop. For most artists, the 42-song salvo of Revenue Retrievin' would have been a once-in-a-career indulgence. For E-40, it was a throat-clearer: he dropped 44 more songs in 2011. A few weeks ago, he made 60 more-- three full albums-- available to his audience with The Block Brochure: Welcome to the Soil. His appetite for life, as for rap, appears to be fearsomely bottomless.
Let's start with the obvious question: do you need all this? E-40 is a personal favorite of mine, and upon hearing The Block Brochure's length, my heart lifted and my stomach sank simultaneously. It was like learning that your best friend is coming to stay with you for three consecutive weeks. You might want to sit down for this, but not all sixty of these songs are equally good. The middle third bogs down. "Mary Jane" is a rote weed tribute; the song with Twista and T-Pain is forgettable. The inspirational joint "Be You" with Too $hort never needed to be recorded, nor did his "kids these days" rant "What Happened to Them Days". But here's the astonishing truth: Not only are none of these songs bad, two-thirds of them range from good to mind-blowing.
The production on The Block Brochure series roams a little wider and farther than the Revenue Retrievin series did, which helps when approaching such a seemingly undigestible block of music. E-40's stable of producers, which includes his son Droop-E, continue spit-polishing the sounds of Bay Area hip hop so that they gleam fresh. Droop-E's talkbox-heavy beat for "Bust Moves" sounds like a DJ Quik production being boiled to a reduction sauce. The civil-disturbance-creating "Slummin'" is like three beats arguing with each other, a collision of tubas, robot voices and choirs. The snare clap on "Outta Town" hits like a handful of stones splashed in a creek. The producers, like the guest rappers (Suga Free, Celly Cell, B-Legit: the same people, mostly, who have been with E-40 since 1994's Federal), are almost entirely unique to E-40's albums at the point: for E-40's longtime listeners, they are like a rowdy congregration of old friends.
That sort of regional tang is alpha and omega of 40's music. On "I'm Laced", he tells of reading "the hood Wikipedia," and his Indian-summer streak might be an attempt to create something sprawling and definitive enough to warrant that title, an update of the hoary old Chuck D "rap is the black CNN" chestnut. In an interview with SPIN earlier this month, E-40 said, "It ain't just my story, that's somebody else's story I'm telling... I got raps to uplift a female. I got raps that I've done that made killers cry. It's like that to this day; it's like that because I tell the real." A lot of rappers say this sort of thing, but E-40 is a uniquely conscientious street reporter. Gangsta rap has an endless catalog of songs about childhood friends torn apart by the streets, for example; it's practically a mini-genre. But E-40's version on The Block Brochure, "What Is It Over?" doesn't include him-- he's the observer. And yet his rhymes are too detailed and compassionate to be an outsider's: "I don't know why it's the childhood friends always end up beefin' and warrin' and funkin'/ Fallin' out with each over some money, or a woman/ At first nobody dies, just a couple of fights and shit talking/ But once somebody dies, it's almost impossible to solve a problem." There's no head-shaking or disapproval in his tone, just a long sigh.
A few big-name visitors stop by. Kendrick Lamar, notably, on "Catch a Fade", and Snoop Dogg, less notably, on "What You Smokin On". But as always, they sound just like that: visitors. The world belongs to E-40, and it's one he's built and rebuilt so endlessly since the mid-1990s that it's become his Our Town. His Bay Area is more palpable than Dre's cartoon Cali; it bustles with smells, with arguments, with small characters chasing odd dreams. It's real, down to the tiniest details like the "Moneygrams [and] Walmarts," the "bootleg man with DVD burns," and the "soul food shops [and] barbershops" that E-40 ticks off, lovingly, on "In the Ghetto". Over the course of three straight hours, he never trips or offers a half-baked line (excepting, perhaps, "I ain't a sandwich/ But I used to be a po' boy.")
E-40 has already promised that the following three volumes of The Block Brochure may be ready for public consumption within the next six or seven months. If this seems like Ahab-level insanity, consider this: The Block Brochure, sold separately as three volumes and as a single 60-song package, occupied four distinct spots on this week’s Billboard Top 200, selling a combined 32,000 units. He sees no reason not to deploy all of this material, and his energy and creativity is such there's little reason to think he won’t continue rapping well until the sun burns out. "I'm hella long-winded/ I'll talk your ear off,” he says on "Blame It on the DJ". As long as he's got it within him to be this absurdly generous with his musical gifts, I'll be sure to clear a spot on my plate for him.
