B. Rich presents Hurry Up And Weight: The Wire Soundtrack (The Wire Music Group)

You might remember a few months ago when I posted a B. Rich song called "Block Hussla" that was supposedly from a new album of his called Hurry Up And Weight. Well, when I was puttin together an iTunes playlist of Baltimore hip hop for a recent Noise post, I realized that the album was released, at least on iTunes, in July, and put the song "Somebody Snitched" on the mix. Like the "presents" part of the title implies, it's not so much a new B. Rich album as it is a compilation to introduce new artists. B. Rich appears on about half the tracks, and on the rest of the songs it's mostly a rapper from Baltimore named Profitness and a singer from Atlanta named Challedon Saltor.

It's a pretty good CD, although it's not a proper B. Rich solo album like Born Rich or 80 Dimes and isn't quite as good as those. But I have the same problem with this that I had with the B-Ill mixtape, which is that they're using The Wire's name and logo in a pretty misleading way, since there's no music from the show on this CD or any other official affiliation with HBO or the series. I actually waited until after the announcement of the official The Wire soundtrack albums to post about this CD, just because I want people to be clear that that's not what this B. Rich record is. Even though his label is called the Wire Music Group, clearly he's trying to draw some association to the show, which is kinda shady to me. Don't be fooled, cop the real thing on January 8th, 2008!

B. Rich, Profitness and Bazemore - "Nuttin To Lose" (mp3)
This cat Profitness from Baltimore who's on a lot of the tracks on here has potential, I like his verses.

Labels: B. Rich, mixtape/album review, mp3