E-40, My Ghetto Report Card

Relatively unfeted outside his home town, Earl Stephens has been a superstar in Oakland for more than a decade. Yet despite his longevity, E-40 is now cresting a new wave as the king of hyphy, the recent addition to hip-hop's stylistic lexicon. Hyphy is rap pared to its barest bones, with kick drums, handclaps and synthesised riffs supporting E-40's character-filled, lewd and often laugh-out-loud funny raps. On Tell Me When to Go, crunk producer Lil' Jon enhances the formula - by making one bass drum sound distort every bar. In the peerless Yay Area, hyphy originator Rick Rock loops an old Digable Planets tongue-twister - "We be to rap like key be to lock" - throughout the track, while in Gouda, he makes Bernard Herrmann's Psycho strings strafe viciously and relentlessly through E-40's quirky paean to the power of the dollar.