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  • Miami New Times

    Budget Ballin'

    South Florida's lawless exotic rental car industry keeps rolling.

    By Gus Garcia-Roberts

  • Houston Press

    Crime Doesn't Pay Back

    In Texas, restitution for victims is nothing but a state-sanctioned sham.

    By Chris Vogel

  • Seattle Weekly

    Hot and Frothy

    If you thought Seattle couldn't fetishize coffee any more, you haven't been to a "cupping" yet.

    By Jonathan Kauffman

Foxy Brown

Brooklyn's Don Diva (Black Rose Entertainment/Koch)

By Ben Westhoff

Published on May 20, 2008 at 11:23am

Naturally, Foxy Brown is the object of Ali G's affections. With her foul mouth and short skirt, she epitomizes the fake gangstaism he parodies. At least she has the track record to support it — she recently finished a stint at Rikers Island, having violated probation stemming from attacking a pair of nail salon employees. "Sometimes I feel like I'm just too fucking real," she raps on Brooklyn's Don Diva. More like too predictable. Since her days as a 16-year-old prodigy on her multiplatinum debut Ill Na Na, her voice has lost all traces of vulnerability, and here she's morphed into a law-evading, fucking, materialistic caricature. "My na na na tastes like Jamaican kiki," she tells us on "When the Lights Go Out," in a classic example of too much information. And that's one of the better tracks. Elsewhere the material sounds dated for having sat on the shelves while she finished her bid. "She Wanna Rude Bwoy," for example, features that ubiquitous Vocoder device; unfortunately, it isn't the T-Pain kind but rather the Eiffel 65 kind. Foxy's flow is as strong as ever but, unfortunately, she doesn't say anything about herself that others haven't already said using more colorful language.