AFTER FURTHER REVIEW: MOMENT OF TRUTH (3/7)

Gang Starr: JFX to LAX (Noo Trybe, 1998, Moment of Truth)

3) “JFK to LAX” is solid too and here’s something I only started thinking about the other night. Despite the fact that, you know, the cover is Guru and Premier in court…despite the fact that this entire song is devoted to Guru working out his feelings about at the gun charge he caught at the airport…I never realized the degree to which Moment of Truth is suffused in the aftermath of that event. On a psychic level, it clearly weighed on Guru and in reaction, he addressed it both directly and obliquely on any number of songs clustered around this point in the album.

In that sense, I found MOT more interesting than I had previously, where I was more focused on analyzing it as a collection of songs (“does it bang?”) and overlooked the what-should-have-been-obvious-fact that Guru’s arrest haunts the entire middle of the album.