Cam’ron’s career hit its zenith with Purple Haze. Take it from the man himself, who regularly calls it his greatest album. And with good reason: Purple Haze fully realized the joy of Cam’s idiosyncratic humor, dadaist impulses, and high-fashion fantasies. A decade and a half on from its release, it remains the purest distillation of the rapper’s polychromatic vision of Harlem.
Can Cam’ron can still cut it at that level? His output has slowed, and his last major outing was on 2018’s dismal Dipset record Diplomatic Ties. Sure, Cam has talked up a Purple Haze sequel for years, but it’s not unreasonable to wonder if the 43-year-old just stamped the title onto these 16 tracks to puff up interest in his new music. Fear not—Purple Haze 2 is very much forged in the spirit of the original. Resurrecting a strand of mid-2000s New York hip-hop built on tightly wound samples and a reduced emphasis on bass, the record has little interest in chasing modern rap trends. And while it doesn’t take a laryngologist to tell that Cam’s voice has thickened over the years, his flow finds a smooth pocket and his writing is as solid as it’s been in ages.
Cam works hard to evoke the spirit of his opus from the opening bell. Long-time collaborators the Heatmakerz build “Toast to Me” around a vocal loop and crashing drums as the star allows his knotty writing style and boundless references to run wild. Here, Cam pays homage to Harlem hoodlum Rich Porter, compares his driveway to the Golden State Warriors’ championship run because his cars sit “back-to-back,” and criticizes the American healthcare system (“Doctors, insurance, nah, they can’t afford all that/One day you’ll be coughin’, next week you in a coffin, Jack”). If nothing else, Purple Haze 2 proves Cam’ron’s brain still doesn’t operate like that of any other rapper.
As has often been the case in recent years, Cam’s lyrics skew more towards the autobiographical than the surreal. It’s fun hearing him reminisce about his 2003 appearance on The O’Reilly Factor and gleeful “I got dirt on you doggy” taunts of its host. But more revealing are his ruminations on his early life. Over the nostalgic piano chords of “Losin’ Weight 3,” Cam revisits himself as a 14-year-old determined to buy his grandmother a washing machine. When local drug dealers who admire his basketball skills refuse to recruit him into their operation, Cam and a friend instead rob a couple at gunpoint and lie to his grandmother that the new appliance came from money won on the court. It’s classic Cam—flooded with rich detail and three-dimensional characters. When he recalls growing up alongside the late Big L and “the dude supposedly killed him” on “This Is My City,” his famously strict rules on snitching force him to concede, “When the time’s right I will tell you about these villains.” It’s a reminder that, even after all these years, there’s still so much of the Cam’ron story we don’t know.
Yet if the original Purple Haze is the creative spirit powering this record, it’s also the standard to which it will inevitably be compared. The gulf between the two is apparent: Instead of “The Dope Man,” Cam’s brilliant East Coast re-imagination of NWA’s ode to a drug dealer, we get him unimaginatively rapping over the familiar sounds of Mary Jane Girls’ “All Night Long” on “Keep Rising.” There’s no potential single here to match “Down and Out,” the best 2004 Kanye West beat that Ye didn’t put on The College Dropout. Guest spots from Dipset are missed, with only Jim Jones making a late appearance on closer “Straight Harlem,” and strangely for one of the funniest skit-makers of all time, there are zero skits. But never mind these gripes. While it’s no match for the original, Purple Haze 2 still gifts us Cam’ron at his most natural and approachable, rapping for the joy of the form.
