Review Summary: While it might've served as a commercial bust in 1996, Shaquille O' Neal's third album vastly improves on his rapping technique and along with a talented guest appearence roster, delivers his best album of his short-lived rap career.
Shaquille O' Neal's NBA career will always be remembered as one of the greatest in league history, but as a rapper it never materialized that way. After his 1993 debut album "Shaq Diesel" went platinum, his later albums weren't as successful with only "Shaq Fu: Da Return" in 1994 garnering gold from the RIAA. His latest album in 2001 never was released to the public, but a few singles were leaked and didn't garner much attention either, but considering he is one of the best basketball players in NBA history and managed to multi-task that with a rap career is quite impressive since not many athletes could replicate that. Looking back almost 15 years after he retired from rapping, considering how horrendous hip-hop has become with the terrible mainstream artists in Lil' Wayne, T.I, T-Pain, and so many more his rap career is deserving of critical attention especially with the vast decline in quality hip-hop. A week after releasing the Best of Shaquille O' Neal, he released his third rap album "You Can't Stop The Reign" in November 1996. A 19 track collection of then-new material by the NBA legend, with production done by DJ Quik, Poke and Tone, Mobb Deep, and Dave Atkinson along with various star-studded appearances from Fat Joe, Jay-Z, Bobby Brown, and even including the late Notorious B.I.G, O'Neal put out a pretty decent album which unfortunately in a time where hip-hop was truly at its peak with 2Pac's "The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory" and Jay-Z's "Reasonable Doubt", wouldn't get much recognition.
O' Neal has been often criticized in the past for his rapping speed and versatility, as highlighted in "(I Know I Got) Skillz" from "Shaq Diesel" and "Shaq's Got It Made" from "Shaq Fu: Da Return", it just wasn't flowing very well and came out as dull and laughable to many. However fortunately he did recognize this issue and in his third hip-hop album he vastly improved on that and perfected his craft very well. His first track, "Still Can't Stop The Reign" displays his immense improvement with his delivery and effusive flow, along with a funky, smooth beat that samples the Loose End's "You Can't Stop The Rain" but its used in such a fantastic way that it easily stands out as the best track in the album, going as far as saying that its his best overall track in his short-lived rap career. That of course is thanks to two verses from the late Notorious B.I.G, which of course is classic as always coming from one of the greatest rappers of all-time. Biggie's final verse ended up being on Michael Jackson's 2001 album "Invincible", his final studio album on the track "Unbreakable". The majority of his tracks were about how he is getting his "legal money", unlike the rappers getting theirs with drugs as highlighted in "Legal Money" and in "It Was All A Dream". While some of the beats in the album are unoriginal and obviously borrowed, O'Neal made them even tighter with his raps and lyrics. It's very clear that Shaq prided himself on being able to rap without cussing or anything explicit, which is why this album is worth a good listen. Can't quite call him the early version of Shad, but he did manage to pull this rap style of his off quite alright."It Was All A Dream" puts that all on full display, with pretty dope rhymes about his successes like "Five movie deal with Disney/Damn I'm getting busy like Dizzy Calepsi/20 mil check from Pepsi". A classic jazzy beat in "Best To Worst" with Peter Gunz, who also was in "It Was All A Dream" provides another good appearance by Gunz and shows more of that explosive energy that Shaquille puts out on the entire album, that richness and raw energy being forgotten and rarely done in current hip-hop today.
"You Can't Stop The Reign" isn't of course mistake-free, with some of his pedestrian funk on his backing tracks starting to get repetitive and therefore annoying. "Just Be Good To Me" is a great example of this, along with the fact that whoever sang in the hook pretty much killed the track. "More To Life" had the same issues, along with horrible guest appearances by Smooth B and Ralph Tresvant (New Edition) with Bobby Brown having the only decent guest part on the track. "No Love Lost" just started off terribly, with Shaq's intro lyrics absolutely hilariously bad along with everything he just does in the entire track. Fortunately with Jay-Z and Lord Tariq appearing on the track, they try their best to make up for the mediocre rapping and lyrics Shaquille did there but the track never really recovered from that. What likely made this album not get as much recognition as it should have probably been given was how it wasn't particularly distinctive, likely from the multitudes of pop-rap albums that were released at the time. Some of the tracks also kinda sounded similar, like "It Was All A Dream" had similar chord progressions to "Let's Wait A While" so it seemed like O'Neal was going in circles or running out of ideas, which probably was why his rap career never materialized to anything greater. He was essentially following what was the trend in music in those times, and if he had a sound that he could call his own maybe his music career wouldn't have turned out the way it did.
"You Can't Stop The Reign" has certainly its good moments, even timeless ones with "Still Can't Stop The Reign" and "It Was All A Dream". However, it does start to unravel its baggage with the repetitive use of the pedestrian funk style that caused people to be turned off by his music. Out of all the albums O'Neal did his third album is easily his best, outdoing "Shaq Diesel" by alot and crushing "Shaq Fu: Da Return". He still however struggled with song structure and some of his lyrics in the album are remiscent of the old self he displayed in his first two albums.If your a big Shaq fan this certainly would fit nicely in your collection, or if your into non-cussing rap this album certainly fits the bill. It is definitely great partying music for those trying to find some. It's a good-natured, mildly-entertaining album that has definite misses and hits while trying to give the listeners a good time, along with a talented roster of guest appearances even though some of their appearances in some of the tracks felt unwarranted. Giving the listeners a good time of course is what O'Neal tried to do in every rap album he did, but of course people just never got into it. While "You Can't Stop The Reign" was practically a commercial bust in the late '90s, it does serve as one of the more underrated rap albums of the decade. While it certainly could never live up to the standard of a Illmatic or a Reasonable Doubt, it does turn out to be much better than some of the stuff we get from hip-hop these days, and if that doesn't get you to give "Big Shaq" a try, then nothing else will.
