“Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan… one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present…. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu.” —The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu
In this episode: Burroughs calls the law. Our hero does some time, is released, discovers that his woman has been sleeping with his best friend, and takes revenge; takes some time to reevaluate his priorities; and re-emerges with a new mission: to teach all the fakers and perpetrators a lesson they won’t soon forget.
As usually happens, as soon as I finished the original Gangsters & Pranksters, I started coming across more songs that fit the theme. A sequel was inevitable, and finally materialized in 2004 in the form of two jam-packed CDs.
When I switched from cassettes to CDs I continued my policy of using every bit of available bandwidth — which makes sound economic sense. But it is obvious now that 80 minutes of music at a time is just too much. So I am dividing the two discs of G&PII into four installments of ~40 minutes each, which is a little more reasonable.
Having decided that the first edition was light on hip-hop, I leaned into the gangsta rap on this one. Maybe a little too much; the n-word appears on it much more than on anything else I’ve ever made, and the b-word too, for that matter. But that’s what can happen when you keep it real.