Mount Westmore: Snoop Cube 40 $hort review — rap supergroup offer lame lines and stuttering beats

Mount Westmore are the Mount Rushmore of west coast rap. The four eminent personages gathered in this venerable supergroup are Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, E-40 and Too $hort. Together they have well over 100 years of recording experience and many millions of sales. They are ancestral elders of Californian hip-hop, responsible back in the day for shifting rap’s centre of gravity westwards. The quartet have joined forces, and from their lips fall — oh dear — some of the lamest rap lines of 2022.

Snoop Cube 40 $hort is the expanded version of an album released as a non-fungible token in the summer, just in time for the collapse in the NFT market. The songs play it safer by sticking to the era of pagers and cassettes. Cowbells jangle, basslines rattle and boom, electro beats stutter. There are several G-funk throwbacks, the signature sound of west coast rap in the 1990s. Its architect, Dr Dre, has a fleeting vocal cameo in “Too Big”. Period references abound, including a vintage piece of rhyming from Ice Cube in which “TJ Hooker” is conjoined with “Superfly Snuka”. 

The aim is to recreate the free-flowing, irreverent atmosphere of old-school rap. There is much locker-room crudeness. Occasionally — very occasionally — our elder statesmen hint at being conscious of the absurdity of their bantering away like this in their fifties. On that score, kudos to E-40 for getting the word “callipygian” into the preposterously lewd “Up & Down”. But he and his fellow grandees are responsible for a good deal of phoned-in clunkers too.

This is a world where tunes have “more bass than baseball” and meeting the four Cali rap legends might make you “poop” (“You think you cool enough to smoke with Snoop?”). “I’m in Rio with a Creole and her homegirl, we a trio,” Ice Cube raps in “Motto”, hitting each stressed syllable like a facepalm. Meanwhile, the beats grow sluggish and repetitive over the course of the album’s hour-plus duration. There is a lot of padding with looped hooks and refrains. Unlike Mount Rushmore’s granite-hewn worthies, Mount Westmore will not become a visitor attraction.

★★☆☆☆

‘Snoop Cube 40 $hort’ is released by Mount Westmore/MNRK Music Group