Devin The Dude: Just Tryin' Ta Live

Dr. Dre's 2001 was partially conceived as a star-making vehicle for Dre protégé Hittman, but an obscure Texas rapper named Devin made more of an impression on a single song ("Fuck You") than Hittman did on nearly half the album. Devin's lazy Southern drawl, loopy charisma, and singular delivery whetted appetites for his second solo record, but the rapper kept fans waiting for three years, an eternity in hip-hop. Devin returned last year to provide the hook for De La Soul's "Baby Phat," but the rapper's work with Dre and De La Soul only hinted at the off-the-wall brilliance of Just Tryin' Ta Live, his long-awaited follow-up to 1998's The Dude. On the new album's first track, Devin adopts the persona of a pot-smoking alien who shops at Wal-Mart and returns to Earth for "the green leafy thing I found in the field," and from there Live gets considerably weirder and more wonderful. One of hip-hop's great characters, Devin combines the self-deprecating humor and slow-rolling funk of The Coup with the spaced-out eccentricity of Madlib's Quasimoto. On Live, Devin wanders in a stoned haze through an inspired comic universe where children who aren't traumatized by his live performances laugh at his clothes and shoes, bouncers don't buy that he's a hip-hop star, and cops know him by name and confiscate his weed on sight. On "Lacville '79," a Dirty South version of The Coup's "Cars And Shoes," Devin pledges his eternal devotion to a broken-down lemon. As put-upon and abused as any silent-comedy stooge, Devin doesn't even have control over his own songs: On "R&B" (that's "reefer and beer"), the track is hijacked by an amiable redneck intent on trying his hand at rap. The disc's first 11 tracks, "R&B" among them, are funny and endearingly strange, but "R&B" is also strangely touching in its earnest assertion that no cultural divide is too wide to be bridged by a drunken, stoned singalong. Superstar guests Dr. Dre, DJ Premier, Xzibit, and Nas all bring their A-game to Live, yet about two-thirds of the way in, the disc suddenly becomes frustratingly generic, winding down with a whimper rather than a bang. But up to that point, it's the weirdest, funniest, most strikingly original Southern rap album this side of OutKast's Stankonia.