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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
An inconsistent mess of an album, March 3, 2002
Remember when you would buy that album from your favorite artist and you would listen to it often while everyone around you would call it wack? Then time passes and you take another listen and you realize that it isn't all that? Well, today's example is 1997's The Firm, consisting of my favorite rappers of the time, Nas, AZ, Foxy Brown, and then-newcomer Nature (replacing the imprisioned Cormega).We all know that rappers like to put fiction in their rhymes, but to picture Nas, AZ and Foxy as some mafioso-type people pushing weight and dressed up in expensive outfits is taking it too far. Songs like "Executive Decision" and "Firm Fiasco" feature Nas as a confused drug kingpin instead of a street griot only wishing of these things like on Illmatic. The other three members, on the other hand, rap pretty damn good. Foxy Brown nearly pushes a man to the curb on "... Somebody Else", though it's pretty corny for Dr. Dre to sample "You Gonna Make Me Love Somebody Else". Nature does his thing on "Five Minutes to Flush", and who could forget AZ and Nas's highlight, "Phone Tap", where their vocals actually sound like they were being listened to by an outsider on the phone? However, the best performances come from the millions of guest stars that otherwise mess up the direction of this album. Almost-famous Noreaga joins Nature in another highlight, "I'm Leaving". AZ and his protege Half-A-Mil convincingly tell you to "Throw Your Guns". And Canibus once again steals the show in "Desparados": remember the line that started with "In fact, perhaps you should quit rap..."? Despite these great performances, they turn the album into a compilation instead of a group debut. Things get worse with the boring rhymes Dre gives in "Firm Family". "Firm All Stars" is another waste of time, and by the way, the song titles are very repetitive ("Firm Fiasco", "Firm Family", "Firm Biz", "Firm All Stars"), and all of these Firm songs only feature two or three members of the Firm. In fact, there isn't one song that features all four members of the group, and those members are--I already forgot, who's in this group again? There's too many guest stars cluttered here to really tell. Maybe this idea for The Firm looked better on paper, because although the music sounds good sometimes, there's a lack of coherency. More and more every day it seems like they just threw this album together. I'm glad they only made one album together, because at the end of the day The Firm just looked like one big gimmick.
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by The Firm 
