Three Six Mafia - 'Most Known Unknown' (Bmg) Released 13/02/06

Three young men from Memphis, Tennessee have been making records under the name Three 6 Mafia for ten years. Main themes within these records seem to rotate around Sex, Drugs and the strip bar down the road. These focal points may seem on the surface to be mundane and overdone, but Three 6 Mafia manages to throw them together and present them in a very unique way.

Featuring grotesquely crepuscular Synth and String arrangements to create an intimidating, almost endearing quality that is so sorely missing from today’s club and hip-hop scene, it becomes evident that this is how 3-6 Mafia achieve their unique feel. From this, each song runs into the next, creating an almost psychedelic feel which in turn is amplified by the curiously repetitive backing tracks, drawing you in and commanding you to sway to the familiar beat. This is, however contrasted and built upon by the harsh rapping in the familiar deep southern accents of ‘Juicy J’, ‘D.J. Paul’ and ‘Crunchy Black’. These clearly torn and fractured souls put on a fronty show of the classic Black North American Ghetto-survivor mystique, but when venturing below the surface of the hard hitting, profanity filled lyrics, you realise these men just yearn for the same things as every one of you reading this does. An easy, trouble free life, despite their past.

On the spoken introduction to Most Known Unknown, DJ Paul explains the title: "Three 6 Mafia is known, but at the same time, they unknown. We got a lot to do with what's going on in hip-hop today, but ****s don't realize it." Despite having just said this, the album’s opening track and first single ‘Stay Fly’ is a curiously light R & B style track, a worrying sign that they may be becoming dangerously close to the mainstream likes of Kanye West. Alas, progressing through the album, it’s increasingly obvious that 3-6 Mafia have certainly retained their sense of style and genre as the beats get harder and the rhythm becomes more relentlessly enticing.

This record is full of perfectly crafted slap-you-up parodies, one of my personal favourites is ‘Haters shaking like booties in the strip club/ I'll cut ya head off like Al-Qaeda in this bitch, what!’ However, at points it veers carelessly into sickening eruptions of misogyny; the rape narrative that Paul throws on ‘Let's Plan a Robbery’, especially, is unforgivable. Five years ago, critic Kelefa Sanneh described the Three 6 Mafia's impenetrably heavy gothic-crunk sound as "a roomful of drunks arguing with an early Steve Reich record." This still remains true, but if this is what you like, this album is surely a pure masterpiece.