Nursery Crimes
Warren G’s Regulate…G Funk Era is the final part of an unholy trinity of releases–beginning with Dr. Dre’s The Chronic and continuing with Snoop Doggy Dogg’s Doggystyle–that has turned rap upside down. Each of them marries the grooviest, smoothest sounds available in rock ‘n’ roll today to a particular form of lyrical outrage: in the first two cases Dre’s nasty, almost cretinous sociopathology and Dogg’s astonishing, bottomless self-absorption. In the case of Warren G, an elementary-school pal of Snoop’s and half brother to Dre, the most distinguishing characteristics are a received toughness, snottiness, and violence: he’s the first in what’s sure to be a wave of second-generation gangsta rappers who can only dream of their predecessors’ criminality. Where the notorious N.W.A. was led and funded by a confessed drug dealer and Dre has proved his manhood beating up both men and women who disagree with him, all Warren G can tell us is that he had a few brushes with gang-banging. His creation fantasy, “Do You See,” is a bleat for inclusion. “You don’t see what I see / Everyday with Warren G / You don’t hear what I hear / ‘Cause it’s so hard to live through these years,” he sings. What a whiner.
