Mystikal Featuring Lil Wayne And Fiend, "Paper Cuts" And The Amorality Of Art

Despite the fact that he has one of the most distinctive voices hip-hop has ever known, it’s hard to root for Mystikal. Recording for Master P’s No Limit Records, the Operation Desert Storm veteran played a major part in putting New Orleans rap on the map in the late ‘90s-remember “Here I Go,” or “It Ain’t My Fault” or “The Man Right Chea?” Then, even as No Limit went into decline, he rose to greater stardom with a string of hits produced by Neptunes that more effectively channeled the spirit of James Brown better than any rapper ever did before or since. “Shake Ya Ass” is one of those songs that have you remembering exactly where you were the first time you heard it. (Nowhere interesting in my case, just in a car, parked in front of a friend’s house in Massachusetts. But still, I remember it very well!) And “Danger,” and “Bouncin’ Back.” He really caught something special there for a while.

I went down to New Orleans to interview him for Vibe magazine in March, 2002. He was perfectly nice, but he travelled with a large crew of bodyguards that, while also perfectly nice, to me at least, boasted of having spent time in jail and threatened people in my presence. I was sad and horrified to learn, five months later, that he had been arrested, along with two of the bodyguards, and charged with the rape and extortion of his hair stylist-apparently enacted, and videotaped, as a form of vigilante justice because they suspected she had stolen money from him. He pleaded guilty to sexual battery the next year, and in 2004 was sentenced to six years in prison and you didn’t hear much more about him after that.

He got out this past January and is back to making music. And I’m surprised by how much I like this new song, “Paper Cuts.” The beat is sort of industrial (I think it’s supposed to sound like a money-counting machine… and it does) but an echoey underlying bass line gives it a very appealing warmth. And it features what is definitely the best verse I’ve heard from Lil Wayne in a good long time (I imagine it was recorded before he want to prison in March) and Mystikal’s old No Limit crony, Fiend, who sounds sweaty and hungry and energized. And Mystikal himself, with that great, gritty hoarseness in his voice (he’s the rap Rod Stewart, maybe?) leaping off the track like it used to, making up for lost time. “Feel like I haven’t dropped an album since the Beatles!” he says, and you can feel it, too.

It’s a lesson in the amorality of art, I guess. The artist does the work and the work now stands as a thing unto itself. It doesn’t matter what you think of the artist as a person or any of the other things he or she has ever done. If it moves you, it moves you. So even if it’s hard to root for this, I can’t help but dig it.