Let's Get Dirty

There is nothing subtle happening here, and that's the entire point. The beat is a blunt instrument — drums that hit like dropped furniture, a hook built for maximum crowd participation at a volume that precludes conversation. Redman operates in a register of gleeful, almost theatrical excess: the delivery is aggressive but clearly having fun with its own aggression, which keeps it from tipping into menace. His voice has a raspy, sandpaper quality that makes even casual lines feel like they're being stated with conviction. The lyrics exist in the tradition of hip-hop's bawdy, carnivalesque dimension — provocation for its own sake, pushing toward the edge of good taste and then waving from there. There's a lineage running through this that connects to Def Squad, to New Jersey's particular flavor of boom-bap irreverence, to a moment in late-'90s hip-hop when party records and street records hadn't yet fully separated into different marketing categories. The cultural function is straightforward: collective release, the kind of song that sounds better with more people in the room. You play it at the point in the night when the pretense of sophistication has been abandoned — windows down, or speakers turned up past the considerate hour. It demands nothing from you except presence and volume.