Cassette Only Songs - LL Cool J "Crime Story"

The Walking with a Panther album is a strange one.  It was considered a flop and the wrong album for the times - and it is inferior to LL's first two releases, no question - yet it sold very well.  There are some real missteps on the record, but there was plenty of good stuff on it, too ("Big Ole Butt" still cracks me up and while it was released earlier on a soundtrack, "Going Back to Cali" is as good as it gets). But there was a reason he opened "Mama Said Knock You Out" with "Don't call it a comeback" and that reason was Walking With a Panther.  During the summer of PE, people didn't want to hear a guy talking about champagne and so forth (I tend to agree).  Oddly, the Bomb Squad did produce two cuts on the album, "Nitro" and "It Gets No Rougher".

One problem with the album is it was just too long. In fact, so long that two cuts made the tape version but didn't carry over to the CD (the tape ran over 84 minutes!).  One of these was "Jack the Ripper,"  a single aimed at Kool Moe Dee from the year before and not part of the Walking sessions. The other was a song called "Crime Story" which was never released on CD, and since Def Jam has no clue on how to promote their back catalog, it likely never will be (I mean, this is the label that cancelled special editions of Public Enemy albums and The Lost Tapes 2 by Nas). 

Anyway, here is "Crime Story" by LL Cool J. And his new album Authentic Hip Hop drops February 12th, which I will be curious to hear. I actually liked his last one, Exit 13, after a string of two or three albums that did almost nothing for me.