M.E.

Rapper/actor M.E. is nice with the pen but delivers a little sloppily, either because he’s too hype for a tame rhythm or because he’s not adjusting the rhymes to the demands of the beats. Holy War is listenable, with many repeatable songs, but suffers from a monotonous coverage of the struggle and the swagger. "BK 2 Harlem,” "Do Dat,” "More” and "Baby Don’t Cry” are worth finding and keeping but between them are inferior variations of the same. M.E. is obviously influenced by Dead Prez but not the early DP that experimented, but rather the recently unsurprising DP that only tap the ghetto for inspiration. There’s more out there and M.E. has spent enough time on primetime television to know this.