Take a Look Around

Masta Ace’s debut on the epochal 1988 Juice Crew posse cut “The Symphony” was a name-maker — even if it took a few years for him to finalize how to spell it. But as Master Ace, he met that early promise quickly on Take A Look Around, his solo debut and only full-length work under the aegis of Marley Marl’s legendary clique. (Marl and Mister Cee’s production here makes for some of the most zero-bullshit immediately-funky beats you could get in 1990 — and for a few years after that.) It’s the start of a discography packed with high-concept storytelling, bitterly prideful claim-staking, and a mic presence that sounded introspectively observant even at his most energetic. Lead-up singles like the inspirational anthem “Together” and the Rakim-inflected uptempo cosmic boasting of a remixed “Letter to the Better” established that Ace could thrive on uplift and conflict alike, but the album had bigger surprises in store — especially the hilariously strange “Me and the Biz,” where Ace stands in for Biz Markie after the original collaborative plans fell through. (You can tell it’s an impression, but his adaptation of Biz’s flow is dead-on nonetheless.) Parcel out the immediacy of his show-and-prove raps (“Can’t Stop the Bumrush”; “Brooklyn Battles”) with the class-conscious ambivalence of cuts like disco-rap aspiration anthem “Postin’ High,” a hip-hop update of Curtis Mayfield’s ghetto-ological “The Other Side of Town,” and the title cut’s cross-examination of how different people deal with hard times, and you get an early prototype for the kind of true-to-life strength-through-consciousness rap that fellow Brooklynites like Mos Def and Jean Grae would thrive with at the other end of the decade.