Album: Goldie Lookin Chain

Safe as Fuck, ATLANTIC

If there's one thing that ages worse than comedy albums, it's musical comedy albums. Goldie Lookin Chain are essentially a one-joke band, and it's hard to imagine anyone playing Safe as Fuck in a year or two's time, when the joke's worn off and nobody wants to hear another boy-band spoof ("R&B") or parodically-overdone vocoder gimmick ("Monkey Love"). Already, the ambulance-chasing compensation solicitors satirised in " Bad Boy Limp" are becoming a thing of the past - though I did laugh at the chant of "shopmobility, shop shopmobility". As expected, drugs feature heavily on Safe as Fuck, with one rapper worrying about the bosom-enhancing effects of smoking GM dope in "HRT", another spooked by passing policemen when stoned in "Paranoia", and a third worrying about drug-induced memory failure in "Short Term". Or maybe it was the same one? I forget. The biggest chuckle is evinced by the ham-fisted attempt to ape Snoop Dogg's staccato "follow me, follow me" shtick in "Maggot at Midnight"; while the least edifying track is probably "Shit Song", a parody of "just another shit song what you hear in the nightclub/ on the radio," etc, intended to satirise the media-saturated ubiquity of generic pop, but doing its job a touch too well for comfort.