The Coup: Kill My Landlord

Recently reissued after spending much of the decade out of print, Kill My Landlord is the Oakland rap group The Coup's uneven but immensely promising 1993 debut. Opening with the audacious "Dig It," one of the funniest and funkiest singles in rap history, Kill My Landlord is full of the fiercely political, self-deprecating, righteous funk that has become The Coup's trademark. Utilizing the same mixture of live instrumentation and minimalist samples the group would later use to greater effect on later albums, Kill My Landlord serves as a manifesto of sorts, laying down The Coup's fully formed ideology largely through a series of sharply drawn, highly political vignettes. "The Coup," for example, serves as a sort of companion piece to Dr. Dre's "The Day The Niggas Took Over," celebrating the discord that followed the acquittal of the officers involved in the Rodney King beating as a revolutionary act of urban dissent, while "Last Blunt" lightheartedly condemns marijuana as an opiate for the blunted and oblivious masses. The music on Kill My Landlord is, for the most part, a bit undernourished, and the album is probably the least essential of The Coup's three releases, but it's well worth buying, especially since the band has an unfortunate tendency to take forever to release new material.