Cam'ron f/ Vado: "La Bomba"

Opinions on Cam thoroughly established, you don’t need to read a review of Killa’s Gangsta Grillz tape, but in a year rather thin on a great rap, this release warrants a bit of exaltation, glee, and a jot of squirming. As I see it, Cam’s willful, slow-motion disintegration into a jester goof is still great, plugging non-sequiturs and dick jokes into his well-worn templates like coke into cookie pans. And here, over a screeching cataclysm of a beat, Cam’ron alternately boasts and self-deprecates, all “I ain’t sell enough records to have the things I got.” If you’ve kept up with post-Purple Haze (2004) Killa, this isn’t news, nor is it a problem, but Boss of all Bosses presents a new conundrum: Cam’s compulsion to replace his Dipset fam with less compelling sidekicks. Enter Vado, who raps on “La Bomba” and every other track on this tape. It’s not that this is an MC Solaar situation—Vado is a capable cohort—but anyone who has perused the Diplomats mixtapes from the early ‘00s (highly recommended) knows Jim Jones and Juelz Santana weren’t assassin apprentices so much as colorful cartoons, in step with Cam’s fluorescent bombast, consistent with the absurd world conjured by his awkward missives. This year’s Crime Pays implicated Cam had decided he would reside in this universe largely in solitude, but this latest effort suggests he might have unwelcome company in tow for the foreseeable future. RIP Dipset, indeed.