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“Well it’s ninety-two we will make it to ninety-three Even on a pop song like “Lost in the Storm” though, borrowing heavily from “The Humpty Dance” and “Sing a Simple Song” for its sound, Chubbster still cared deeply. Other than Public Enemy albums (one of which comically described Flavor Flav as saying “as lamem likum” instead of “asalaam alaikum”) very few artists or their record labels bothered to include them - probably because of the printing costs but more likely because they assumed the fans didn’t care.

This wasn’t exactly a common occurrence in those days. The choice to subtitle it “Book of Rhymes” was not accidental, as Chubbster put serious thought into each bar he spit and reflected it by including the lyrics inside. The breakthrough to the airwaves and MTV of Chubb’s third album necessitated a follow up, and two years later “ I Gotta Get Mine Yo!” was the response. To put it succinctly, in an era where skill matter, Chubbs had ‘NUFF skill. The fact that rapper born Richard Simpson was a National Merit Scholar and pre-med student before his rap career took off oozed out of every pore of the album.

The physically and mentally large in stature rapper was ably assisted by Hitman Howie Tee in crafting an album that stood the test of time by the quality of both commercial hits like “The Chubbster” and cautionary street tales like “The Night Scene”. Happily for me when I looked back on Chubb Rock’s “ The One” in 2012 his album had aged quite well. Then as now the phrase implied a look back at a hip-hop release from a different era, often one the writer remembered fondly, but sometimes one that had not aged well in the intervening years.

In a previous iteration of this publication, we specifically labeled reviews such as this as Back to the Lab.