It's 1996 and the city of hip hop is collapsing. Once-proud buildings crumble to heaps of sameness. Tough-posing gangstas torch art museums for insurance money and speed off in platinum-rimmed Lexuses. Smoke fills the air while legions of zombied MCs roam the cracked pavement, searching for one last hit of the green paper drug. "Jump up in my Rolls Royce / Top choice," raps Jeru The Damaja atop a playful kiddie piano. "Make 'em holler / Everything I do is for the dollar." Can it be? Has the ignorance-battling hero of the 1994 classic The Sun Rises In The East sold his knowledge for a bottle of Cristal? Course not. Wrath Of The Math's "Tha Bullshit" is a skillful parody; moments later, gunshots awaken Jeru from his "scary muthaf#ckin' dream." Armed with a prophet's sense of social responsibility, Webster's vocab, and the best beats in the business, Jeru takes direct aim at Biggie, Puffy, and the rest of hip-hop's Versace-clad villains. The New Orleans cowbell and a rub-a-dub bassline of Junior M.A.F.I.A.'s "Player's Anthem" get diced and spliced into "Ya Playin' Yaself." Scolding words shake over the new groove like Jell-O being carried down a spiral staircase. Jeru's at his best, though, when he fights playa-ism with its most potent weapon: sharp visual, action-packed narrative. In "One Day," hip hop itself is personified; after "he's" kidnapped, Puffy gets blamed for "getting him drunk and f#cking his mind up." Throughout his album-long mission to recapture the music, Jeru is accompanied by the simple elegance of DJ Premier's production. His sparse, busted-woofer beats could walk through the rubble of a city afire. They'd never even blink. And as the skyline burns, a frowning Jeru the Damaja looms large on the horizon. Champagne-sipping pillagers beware. His wrath is mighty. - Vibe Magazine (November, 1996). Revisit this classic album below...