Spring Album Roundup: From Naughty and Nice Rap to Willie Country

NAUGHTY BY NATURE

“19NaughtyIII”

Tommy Boy

* * 1/2

The debut album by this Jersey trio was remarkable for its extremes. The fabulously wicked chant “O.P.P.” masterfully captured hip-hop’s silly side even better than that genre’s prime exponent, Digital Underground. And in the bittersweet “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright,” the group delivered an astonishingly powerful song (melody and all) that is second in life-in-the-ghetto resonance only to the Geto Boys’ “Mind Playing Tricks on Me.”

Between those two numbers lay a lot of free-flowing but sometimes flaccid rhymes and raps. That same sort of basically enjoyable but excessively homogeneous mass of music is all we get here. The beats are mostly snappy and the rhymes catchy, as on the leadoff single, “Hip Hop Hooray.” But often the lyrics are so oblique as to be incomprehensible.

“19NaughtyIII” is undoubtedly better than 95% of the hip-hop albums that will be released this year. But when you’re Naughty by Nature--and hence rival-less by reputation--that’s not good enough.