Rating: NN
Much as I hate Ja Rule (and did long before he started the awful singing), it’s sad how hard he got smushed by the 50 Cent/Eminem/G-Unit feud. Though the beef wiped Ja off the map, it did serve to make him hungry again. We got Clap Back and New York a couple of years back, and now Ja delivers one of his best songs ever – the title track of this best-of, where his growl meets buoyant soul in a cogent look back at his career that’s part defensive and part a vow that Ja is done. The explicit acknowledgement of his faded star is a strikingly Zen outlook for a dude who (aided by two J.Lo remixes, though only the Flava In Ya Ear-jacked Ain’t It Funny is here) spent most of his bafflingly popular phase yelling, crying and singing drunkenly about murdering, hollering and giving your woman good lovin’. Even Ja’s hits are still trash, but this gets slight bonus marks for irony and traces of guilty pleasure and for documenting a mainstream rap curiosity who’s certain to reach MC Hammer-level notoriety eventually.
