According to Plutarch, Alexander the Great wept not because there were no more worlds to conquer, but because he’d yet to become the master of a single one. Were the Macedonian warrior-king alive today, he and E-40 could discuss the finer points of boundless ambition, perhaps over a bottle of Earl Stevens Mangoscato. At 50 years old—E-50, if you will—the Vallejo rapper, label owner, beverage impresario, and Wingstop franchisee has released Connected and Respected, his fourth collaboration with his cousin B-Legit. Counting his LPs with the Click and Too $hort, Connected and Respected is E-40’s 30th album. There are no more worlds left for him to conquer.
E-40 wasn’t the first Bay Area rapper (that was probably Motorcycle Mike) and he wasn’t its first homegrown star (that was Too $hort), but the slang maven with the quicksilver voice is its arch-stylist. At his peak, E-40’s verses ebbed and flowed like Napa River tides and had the carefree, unencumbered sway of a Hillside sideshow. He was a thrilling listen: a line’s meter and syllables had little bearing on those of the next, so every verse had a breathless, acrobatic quality. But thirty years of rapping has dulled his powers. Either the ravages of age or an understandable ebbing of interest has turned his voice, once volcanic, into something more viscous. He remains a gifted rapper and a witty lyricist, but he’s human—and, for E-40, that wasn’t always the case.
Fortunately, he and B-Legit (whose own Tryin’ to Get a Buck and The Hemp Museum are critically underappreciated) have a chemistry forged by time and consanguinity. Historically, B-Legit, with his deep, plainspoken lilt, has played the straight man to E-40’s antic, vibrating energy. E-40 was the gun that shot a BANG! flag; B-Legit was the jet-black truncheon in a dark alleyway. On Connected and Respected, that calculus has been altered. They now share an age-appropriate world-weariness, and the lightheartedness that marked classics like their (and Mac Shawn’s) “Sideways” and the Click’s “Hurricane” is largely absent. When their hard-bitten bad cop-bad cop routine works, it works well. The wizened, slightly dyspeptic storytelling of “Life Lessons,” “Up Against It,” “Barbershop,” and Click reunion cut “Blame It” would have been out of character 20 years ago but, with both rappers nearing or at their fifties, their transition into elder statesmen feels right.
What feels wrong, though, is the limited range of Connected and Respected. Despite its array of respected Bay Area producers—most notably P-Lo, Traxamillion, and the Mekanix—there’s an off-putting uniformity to the album, which is stuck in a gray zone that’s either post-Mobb Music or post-Mustard, depending on your historical perspective. This seems less the fault of the producers than it does E-40 and B-Legit. When they’re engaged, the album’s washed-out palette plays as menace rather than exhaustion. There’s a revealing contrast to be found in the work of SOB X RBE: A similarly restricted sound feels more exciting in the hands of the hellions from Vallejo’s Country Club Crest, probably because they’re young and rap like their shoes are on fire.
The cousins’ most dramatic deviation from that monochromatic tone is the album’s capper, “So High.” It might be a cynical play for song-of-the-summer status, but that’s ultimately immaterial. The sample of Howard Johnson’s pleading 1982 electro-boogie jam “So Fine” is pitch-perfect for our aging protagonists. It’s a bolt of fresh, pure orange light on an album that, after 19 songs and 57 minutes, can become cloudy and overbearing. It’s nostalgic without being cloying, fun without being overly self-aware, and the logical—and enjoyable—extension of two careers spent interpolating and reinterpreting funk and soul. It’s not a new world for E-40 to conquer, but a sunkissed coast worth revisiting.
