Wu-Tang Clan member Ghostface Killah is my all-time favorite rapper, a prolific MC who slices through soul-tinged productions with insane syntactical acrobatics, bars packed with alliterative plosives, and labyrinthine storytelling told in the various voices of different characters. With some minor alterations (2009's Ghostdini: Wizard of Poetry in Emerald City leaned towards contemporary R&B; last year's Twelve Reasons to Die was an album-length collaboration with soul-music scholar Adrian Younge), almost all of Ghostface's albums over the past 20 years consist of the rapper flexing linguistic muscle over mid-90s-era boom-bap built on old soul and jazz samples.…
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