Funny how, these days, everything not touched by the hand of Pharrell sounds… well, smaller – but Trak Starz, Jackpot’s producers, are too playful, and unshowy with their skills, to be written off as merely a Dunnes Stores Neptunes.
Nor, as has been claimed, is St. Louis native Chingy (protégé of Ludacris, hence this release on Luda’s Disturbing Tha Peace label) merely a January-sale Nelly. He might share a fetish for the distorted phonetics of the Dirty South – hence post-‘Hot In Herre’ tunes like the brilliantly slouchy, grinning tease of ‘Right Thurr’ – but he’s his own man, and he clearly takes much delight in playing with the sound of his own quirky vowels and consonants, in a way that recalls Andre 3000 (high praise indeed).
This sonic eccentricity, in conjunction with Chingy’s smallish, Eminem-ishly nasal, almost cute voice, means he’s charming enough to get away with not only the usual sex-brag trash talk (does any man in hip hop not do this?) but also an album-wide pimps-and-hos motif featuring seriously uncool passages that would be utterly unacceptable in anyone else’s mouth (check ‘Whurr’s My Cash’, or the pimp monologue ‘Jackpot The Pimp’ that finishes, “Bitch, c’merre”). Mind you, why we should pick on Jackpot for this and not, say, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City or your average episode of The Sopranos admittedly eludes me.
In any case, Jackpot won’t quite make a noise as big as any of the recent Neptunes-assisted pop-classics-u-like, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun in its own way. ‘Right Thurr’ apart, there’s also ‘Chingy Jackpot’, which would be a killer pop single if it weren’t for the hilarious, if decidedly un-PC, lyric “Chingy/ (Whassup?)/Why ya eyes so chinky?/(I don’t know!)/ Is it cos ya been smokin’ and drinky?” Also irresistible is the giggly, stoned drawl of ‘Holidae In’ (pronounced, to our great delight, ‘Holiday Eeeeeeein’) featuring Ludacris & Snoop Dogg: you can see why it was the Christmas-week record in the US a month ago. Pass that dutch over herre.