Pitchfork

Less than a week after the early-December release of Purple Haze, Jay-Z became the president of Def Jam Records, and that company made arrangements to seize control of Roc-A-Fella Records, the subsidiary that Jay started with his onetime friend Damon Dash. Dash left the label completely, announcing his plans to start another label called Roc-4-Life. Cam'ron, Dash's friend and one of Roc-A-Fella's flagship artists, attempted to leave the label as well, saying that Roc-A-Fella hadn't given Purple Haze an adequate promotional push-- which is strange considering the album had been in stores for less than a week.

Cam's departure from Roc-A-Fella is still in doubt. But if he isn't contractually obligated to stick it out with Def Jam, this is the end of an era-- a time when a word-twisting surrealist amoral prince had the resources of rap's most successful imprint at his disposal-- and Purple Haze is its last document.

Purple Haze creates its own world both sonically and lyrically. The beats range from wistful chipmunk soul to oppressive, stripped-down, bell-rattling NWA jacks to hypnotic, muted electro bounce. But whether the producers are dishing out the swirling operatic vocals of "Killa Cam" or the chopped-up hair metal guitars of "Bubble Music", they add up to a frozen, prismatic creep, a slow, hard, cinematic bed for Cam's magnetic flow.

And Cam's flow is a thing of beauty. His bored, arrogant voice rolls syllables around until he's hit just about every possible permutation, transforming hard consonants into thrown rocks and idly toying with drug metaphors like they're Rubik's Cubes. In Cam's world, he's the king of Harlem, moving kilos, dispatching foes, and throwing around money with Machiavellian cool. Cam has the warped eloquence of an MF Doom even when he's bragging about violence ("Observe, cock, and spray/ We hit you from a block away/ Drinking saki on a Suzuki in Osaka Bay") or conspicuous consumption ("I park in the towaway zone, chrome/ I don't care; that car a throwaway, homes").

Occasionally, he veers off into pure gibberish: "Wreckx-N-Effect, zoom zoom, poon poon/ Since the movie Cocoon, had the Uzi platoon." The ugliness of Cam's world is never more evident than when he's talking about women: "Any girl I get, I totally open 'em/ Brain and they legs, cokin' and dopin' 'em". Cam's misogyny comes through the speakers like a slap; it's jarring and frightening and sad. But Cam isn't heartless; a few of the songs have an air of weary lamentation, like Tony Soprano driving home after killing his cousin, wondering how it came to this: "I give you a earful, it's tearful/ Told my mother I hustle, and she said, 'Be careful'.

Purple Haze is like a Takeshi Kitano gangster movie; every moment of transcendent musical or linguistic beauty is shadowed by the spectre of death, an end so inevitable that Cam doesn't even let it get to him anymore. There's no sense of joy or exhilaration in his spending and shooting and fucking, but it's the only thing he knows.