Thugs Are Us
On the skit that opens his third album,Thugs Are Us,  Liberty City's thug prince, Trick Daddy, converses with a youngster  smoking on the street corner, who seems to have taken his music a  little too seriously. "Don't be like me nigga, be yourself," he advises  the corrupted minor. Cue "I'm a Thug," where an angelic chorus of  streetwalkers sympathizes sweetly as the slurry MC drawls an  affirmation of his ghetto identity. The remainder of the album features  a predictable but engaging trunk of funk that soundtracks Trick Daddy's  cartoonish pimp exploits. It runs from theJames Brown-jacking "Take It to the House" to the 1980s New Wave swoosh of "Noodles" and  the loved-up gangsta sounds of "N-Word." "Where You From" rotates with  a robotic voice and a satisfactory thump, and features an appearance  from Daddy's "little goil,"Trina. And when  she opens her mouth, out spill filthy rhymes galore. She returns on  "For All My Ladies," a ghetto version of "Independent Woman" cut to a  holler of "Get Money!!" But Trick blows the emancipation proclamation  by preceding it with a version ofIce-T's "99  Problems," a list of all the tricky women in his little black book of  rhymes. Times may change but Trick Daddy's doesn't.--Chris  Campion