Charizma
Big Shots

Stones Throw 2003

By Daltry Tanner

Not to retread on that prior write-up, because their album is not utter shit, but Clipse has left me wanting something different in my hip hop lately. Between the icy drizzle and all of this fucked shit on the news, it’s hard to get in the mood for two nogs bragging about murder like still-free misanthropes scurrying in New Orleans after-dark. Critics are like, “if you like dealing drugs and listening to sniffle-rap, this is your album of the year!” Hey, I’ve got a jones for murder and Griselda Blanco like the next white idiot, but even Walker and Texas Ranger (T.R.) are a more believable duo of take-no-shit-talkers. Maybe that’s why you’re not hearing Clipse much in the South right now.

On with the odd segue. Filling in the personal void and exhaustion left by Hell Hath No Fury is Charizma’s Big Shots, which has origins dating back to the early ‘90s; a rap bastard album of topical material like bubble baths, ice cream trucks, “apple juice breaks,” minor larceny and Darryl Strawberry. There are those who know, but for the many who don’t, I might as well be regressing to Kid ‘N Play instead of visiting near classic material.

Before he was shot dead in ’93, Charizma was homies with a young Peanut Butter Wolf, and some of Wolf’s earliest jazz-enlightened production runs effortlessly here like soulful rails. Experiencing Charizma’s raps on top of those beats for the first time (and last) is similar to living out an audio-book entitled Jimmy Jump in the Cupboard. The album is buck wild with unstoppable old school head nodding and slang so outdated it sounds creatively free.

Comparing artists from such a broad spectrum of the hip hop timetable may seem ridiculous, but given that Big Shots wasn’t released until a decade after its completion, on PBW’s Stones Throw, it’s the rare – and possibly only – rap album orphaned by the sentiments of greatness it would have earned within the context of its time.

So, as an odd result, this shit is inarguably timeless. Trailing Charizma's flows as they zag to the function of a figurative stoplight, or lapping up the energy he exterted here, that of being huddled in a smoky cyph, give Big Shots a quirkily nefarious appeal in face of current hip hop’s misanthropic, escalated tales of murder. If you’re going to commit a crime, chew a stick of gum and do it to this.

This discourse of Charizma’s Big Shots is written by Daltry Tanner for ignore Magazine, copyright 2007.