E-Mail This Article to a Friend Ghetto blasting Jadakiss takes his shots on Kiss of Death BY FRANKLIN SOULTS

The other day, I was stopped at a red light on Cleveland’s East Side when a large, silver SUV pulled up booming Jadakiss’s new hit album, Kiss of Death (Ruff Ryders/Interscope). Given the setting, the scene was hardly remarkable. Cleveland’s East Side is something like Boston’s Roxbury, the South Side of Chicago, or the hood that Eminem sings about on "Welcome to D-Block," his cameo cut on Kiss of Death: "The sun don’t shine here in this part of town/But we all got a town that’s similar to this too/Because every city’s got a ghetto, every ghetto’s got a hood/Take a good look around you, cuz there’s a D-Block near you."

"Welcome to D -Block" drapes a noble cloak over the grim deprivation and depravation it describes, with strings and acoustic guitars laying down menacing, minor-key figures over a slow heartbeat rhythm. As Eminem suggests, it’s all too depressingly familiar. But I remember the tiny SUV incident because, for the most part, Kiss of Death isn’t familiar at all. As the odds would have it, the track booming out of the SUV wasn’t Eminem’s cameo but a more characteristic cut, the Neptunes-produced bob-along "Hot Sauce To Go." At the light, as the uncommonly nimble bass line bumped against Jadakiss’s mischievous boasts ("Picked her up in the maroon Lincoln/Blew her back out until the moon sinkin’ "), I glanced up and noticed the driver doing something I usually don’t see young African-American men do while blaring gangsta rap in the hood: grinning.

That’s "grinning," not "smiling." Smiles are for shiny happy pop music. Jadakiss, on the other hand, avows early on in Kiss of Death that he’s "everything: controversial/Underground, gangsta-rap slash commercial," and true to his word, he tries to do it all at once, never straying far from the nastiness no matter how nice he makes. But excluding the requisite gangland "Intro" and the rap-metal bloodbath "Shoot Outs," the opposite holds true too — all that depressingly familiar gangsta terrain is revitalized with unexpected beats and rhymes, ideas and moods. The disc’s second half has the gripping extended metaphor of "By Your Side," the warped Middle Eastern strings of "Gettin’ It In"; even "Welcome to D-Block" is brightened by the contrast of Eminem’s bold, bouncing delivery against Jadakiss’s raspy, steady flow. And the first half is better than that, with nine solid cuts offering the most inviting run of thuggish raps I’ve heard in years. Ghostface Killah may be more imaginative, but Ghostface also coasts on his eccentricity; 50 Cent may be more "real," but that’s just because he’s really a two-bit con; M.O.P. is definitely rougher, but the duo are stampeding elephants next to Jadakiss’s stalking lion.

That doesn’t mean Kiss of Death vindicates gangsta apologists who argue that musical might always makes æsthetic right. Jadakiss’s craft and wit stand in contrast to his brutality, thereby tempering it. More important, the other contrasts in his music — the "slash" that he lays between "gangsta rap" and "commercial," between the hood and the world — create meanings that go beyond the rapper’s stylistic command. When he raps, "I’m a man of the Lord but still can’t shake the devil/Moved away and still can’t escape the ghetto," it resonates because that struggle plays out in almost every track.

Jadakiss first tasted the serpent’s fruit as a member of the Lox, a trio whose 1998 debut, Money, Power & Respect (Bad Boy), was a well-honed, utterly cynical dose of received thugitude. But now, the 29-year-old’s second solo album proves that cynicism can run both ways. Despite all the explicit talk of drugs, violence, and sex, the album has been criticized in the mass media for only a single line: "Why did Bush knock down the towers?" Buried deep in the current single "Why," it’s one of a litany of unanswerable questions that delineate Jadakiss’s ambitions and limitations ("Why they sellin’ niggas’ CDs for under a dime?/And if it’s all love, daddy, why you come with your nine?").

"Obviously it’s only a metaphor," Jadakiss told the Washington Post of the towers line on July 16. "Ultimately, at the end of the day, he’s the boss. The buck stops with him." The Post suspects "media coaching" because on July 9, it reports, Jadakiss told Billboard.com, "I just felt he [Bush] had something to do with it. That’s why I put it in there like that. A lot of my people felt he had something to do with it." Maybe that claim is more deprived and depraved than anything you’ll find on Kiss of Death, but whereas the Post calls Jadakiss’s reinterpretation of it "coaching," you could also call it "learning." After all, the best thing about Kiss of Death isn’t that Jadakiss welcomes you to D-Block but that he fights to escape it.