Inner City Posse – Intelligence & Violence (1990)

January 29, 2024

This doesn’t sound anywhere near as bad as you’d think it would. To be honest, calling this an ICP release is really a stretch. I understand why it gets labelled as such, with the ICP gang existing a good while before ICP the musical project, but in J’s book he seems to make it out like this “Intelligence & Violence” project with D-Lyrical was something else entirely that pre-dated ICP. I guess he could be playing it down to fit a certain narrative, but both John KJ and Shaggy 2 Dope – the other original ICP members – are not present here either.

Quality wise, this isn’t a million miles away from Basement Cuts. D-Lyrical barely pops his head up all that often, with J just rolling over the whole album. His raps are of varied quality; in some cases you can really feel the foundations for stuff like Carnival Of Carnage, in other cases the rhymes and/or flow are a bit shaky. But hey, this is really, really early days, so I can’t fault him for that.