Like just about every other member of the Wu-Tang Clan, Ghostface Killah has long seemed able to pull off anything. For years he’s dropped effortlessly clever verses, rocked glasses before Lupe Fiasco appeared four-eyed on the rap radar and put out eight solo albums. Yet on his latest release, Ghostdini: The Wizard of Poetry in Emerald City, he has adopted one persona that doesn’t quite fit: the smooth-talking lover boy.
Ghostdini is the rapper’s first R&B album and, as he’s made clear in interviews, he wanted every track to be about the ladies. So there are no finely painted portraits of street life, of fame, of the Clan’s justifiable bravado or of any other topic Ghostface has conquered in the past. And though Ghostface’s lyrical talent combines with solid production to make a lot of the songs work, overall the album is, well, a little strange.
It’s strange for Ghostface to draw so much from soulful guests like John Legend and Raheem DeVaughn, and though it comes with the R&B territory it’s strange too for one of his albums to center on their hooks rather than his verses. Even he doesn’t seem to know exactly what to do with himself in this mode, jumping from the first three gushing tracks to the jarringly graphic “Stapleton Sex.”
The effort here reads as if he needs to prove he’s still “man enough” to tell a woman what to do in bed. When he returns to his low-key style and inclination for the narratives of “Stay” and “Guest House,” his talent is as palpable as ever. But there are only so many ways to rap “I love you,” and an artist as versatile as Ghostface needs diverse subject matter to shine. The Wizard of Poetry needs to magic himself out of this lovesick state.
