Still, there's a lot to enjoy here. For one thing, X's producers never let him down. Battle Cat surprises the most with unpredictably subtle percussive treats. Soopafly provides goofy Benny Hill ding-a-ling on "Fuckin' You Right" (which informs ladies that sex on the side is all to serve them better). Dre and his partners lay out more 2001-style slinky beats and heavy-metal string-section riffs. But Xzibit, whose previous albums from 1996 and 1998 failed to break big, raps too much about his music and its alleged effect on the world. It's a curious experience in meta-reality: You figure that this Xzibit CD must be talking about some alternate world where he did indeed "rearrange the whole game with [his] rugged sound" and he is in fact "too complex to break down in black and white," and where Xzibit, unlike other rappers, who have "nothing to say," is "push[ing] the culture."
Nevertheless, Xzibit makes it all sound hard and sweet. More and more detached from the sonic tropes that defined hip-hop when it first hit, kings like Dre and his extended family deliver solid pop tunes built on funky/catchy percussive hooks attached to memorable choruses. Their style is built on rap not as revolution, but as the latest evolution in the eternal pop marketplace -- a marketplace that continues to provide tasty goods.