"Off Parole" (2000)
Diary of the Originator, Chapter 211
“Off Parole” is a cheerful welcome home/27th birthday tape for Texas Slim, with Screw fittingly playing a Screwed Up Click classic early on - Big Pokey’s “Ball-N’ Parlay.”
“Ball N-Parley” is much the perfect Screw track - a jubilant posse cut of some of the best rappers in his crew, great in its original version but totally transcendent in his version, impossible to not only nod your head with but also swing your shoulders and damn near every limb to. He understandably loved the song, playing it on at least seven tapes and on this one blends the later half of Hot Boys’ “Respect My Mind” (a combination that should not work but does) and the first half of 8Ball and MJG’s “Just Like Candy” in and out of the track, riding Reeko’s beat up and down I-55.
Which is fitting because the track has become a bit of a regional anthem, becoming the Tuskegee University Marching Crimson Piper Band’s pregame warmup, complete with some real life-affirming horns.
The rest of the tape is a pretty good primer for someone getting back on the street in 2000 for the first time in five years - a lot of Dr. Dre, and a lot of Mannie Fresh.
Despite it’s obvious pleasures, post-Chronic Dre has always sounded too glossy, too expensive to me; his boards always sound like they just got Lysoled. It’s g-funk for a Tesla, not an Impala. But that doesn’t dissuade Screw in the least, running through three tracks from 2001 on this tape, and the results are glorious - Xxplosive’s kick drum sounds like a battering ram stuck in quicksand, the guitar on Bitch N——- becomes a melancholic Fado-riff, Housewife gets pleasantly stuck in molasses. In other words, versions that way more interesting than the originals.
Perhaps less surprisingly, those Mannie Fresh tracks sound great too - particularly the pleasantly sluggish “I Feel,” down from its original 152 bpm to a version with what feels like a vocoder running out of batteries and a hung over Funky Four Plus One.
But let’s be real, you’re still listening to those marching band videos.
