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No limit records albums11/8/2023 ![]() FOX’s newest soap opera, K’Ville, as in Katrina Ville, is likely to join this list if it isn’t soon cancelled. This was, in effect, the same revolution that transformed Kuala Lumpur into a capital of global finance the same restructuring of possibilities that Rap, R&B, and Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat are all about.īut the No Limit covers stand out from other illustrations of the hood rich paradox: they belong in a lineage of bathetic, hyper-tragic New Orleans death imagery, a tradition which encompasses Voodoo, Jazz funerals and Interview with a Vampire. Then, suddenly, all they had to do was download adobe Photoshop and the Gilded Age was only an apple-v away. Since the dawn of Reaganomics, underground rappers had endeavored to parody robber barons, but more often than not, financial expedience forced the artists to either reclaim bauble like glossy jump suits or ante up and rent a 1948 Cabriolet from 310 Motors. Inherent in all this was a change of medium. Above all, of course, the imagery dealt in bottomless, mellifluous wealth, as if even the lowly packaging department could afford to stud Master P’s stage name in diamonds, on every CD. Every theme discussed in the audio content, fear, persecution, compunction, mortality, was represented by clip art on the cover: say, a snarling dog on Skull Duggery’s These Wicked Streets or an ominous crow perched on C-Murder’s Life or Death, hinting at the latter outcome. ![]() ![]() Every pixel of eye space was packed with cut-and-paste hood rich mis-en-scene. Boxed into brilliant, neon color-coded plastic cases striped with indentations, No Limit CDs stood out: you could spot one from across the Costco. To lift those units into the realm of visibility, No Limit’s marketing strategy emphasized first impressions over repeated listens, and accordingly demanded far more care be invested in the cover art than the beats. A few of Master P’s pricier recruits, Mystikal, Fiend, and Snoop Dog, actually managed decent albums, but No Limit’s bread-and-butter were the third-rate solo records that consistently surpassed sales targets. Keenly, hip-hop has recognized the artistic merit of logos and sloganeering since the days before graf squads and break dancing crews got nudged out of the temple. But consider that, at its best, modern branding allows businessmen to curtail the production costs of an item while drastically, senselessly over-inflating its desirability. That quantity-over-quality approach may seem counterintuitive in strictly musical terms. While bigger labels escalated monstrous bidding wars over up-and-coming starlets, the New Orleans magnate enlisted his siblings and marginally talented neighbors to churn out CDs burned to the rim with 79 minutes and 58 seconds of scorched earth, shell-shocked braggadocio/remorse voiced in drug dealer’s argot. Label founder Master P was the Ray Kroc of hip-hop, a corner-cutting mogul who could whip up a gold-selling album, McGuiver-style, out of a torn shoelace and a shotgun shell if ever it came to that, and sometimes it practically did. But if any one visual movement did justice to the absurd, untenable profitability of that dot-com windfall, it was the striking art of No Limit Records, the apex and nadir of commercial hip-hop thuggery. ![]() Cinematically, CGI-injected blockbusters like Toy Story and Jurassic Park have conveyed the promise and opportunity of those boon times with blinding, crayon-box colors and dazzling green screen chicanery. It was a roaring, cumulative moment in our nation’s history when most about anything packaged in CD form would outsell industry expectations. Catch one at the right lecture series and plenty a wispy, bearded music industry old timer will position you on his or her knee and rhetorically whisk you away to a delightful Eden, a time when America was safe from terrorism and its lesser cousin, file sharing.
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