A crescendo might gain thrilling momentum only to slam abruptly into silence. Two chords might repeat for 10 minutes, until that relatively small sliver of time feels like eternity. At times, they sound like a hardcore band that never got the memo about brevity at others, like a religious cult for whom the sound of a skipping CD is the embodiment of the divine. The Osaka collective’s fifth full-length comes the closest to encapsulating the entirety of their journey, with long passages of the ecstatic trance-rock that would characterize their later years, punctuated frequently with the cartoonish riffs and chaotic smash cuts that had been their specialty early on. –Julianne Escobedo Shepherdīoredoms started in 1986 as something like a noise band, and ended three decades later as something like a mountain. Salt-N-Pepa just happened to get there early. Blige’s “I'll Be There for You/You're All I Need to Get By” weren’t far away. More than that, though, hip-hop was beginning to thaw to the idea of incorporating R&B and pop: Puff had convened Bad Boy Records in 1993, and genre-shifting cuts like Method Man and Mary J. But in the wake of the so-called “ Year of the Woman,” their career-long pop sensibilities congealed in the hits “Shoop” and the En Vogue-featuring “Whatta Man,” positive anthems that remain stalwart in the wedding and auntie playlists. They didn’t change up their raison d’etre: Salt, Pepa, and Spinderella were still committed to women determining their own futures and calling out creepers and weirdos. Salt-N-Pepa were a rebuke to the music industry’s storied disdain for women rappers, having gone platinum on their first two records by their fourth album Very Necessary, which quickly went multi-platinum, the trio could not be denied.
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