Years later it was revealed that Knieght Rieduz were none other than Krayzie, his wife LaReece, and protégés Mo!Hart and Sin in makeup with their voices distorted—talk about a bad gimmick. “Knieght Rieduz (Here We Come)” is laughably bad, a sonically painful song from a masked horrorcore group whose sincerity is impossible to assess. Krayzie doesn’t even rap on “(Relay) ThugLine” save for the hook, leaving those duties to the unimpressive female quartet Relay. The shameless promotion of ThugLine artists immediately grows tiresome, especially because it inflates the already overstuffed tracklist. Two of the best songs on the first disc are the rallying “World War,” an ominous pump-up jam, and “The War Iz On,” a smooth, sinister collaboration with Snoop Dogg, Kurupt, and Layzie Bone. Still, most of disc one is plagued by a lack of concepts: “Thugz All Ova Da World,” “Street People,” “Pimpz, Thugz, Hustlaz & Gangstaz,” and “Thug Alwayz” are as predictable as their titles indicate.
He spins a violent narrative on the decent “Payback Iz a Bitch” and the best song on either disc is “Thug Mentality,” a heartfelt, harmonized assessment of the criminal lifestyle over wonderful production, making for perhaps his finest solo track to date. On “Paper,” anchored by a cleverly-flipped classic soul sample, Krayzie sports his signature bass, crooning between his socially conscious verses. The opener “Heated Heavy” is impressive because it features quite possibly the fastest rapping I’ve ever heard—if there was any question, Krayzie could give Twista a run for his money any day. Krayzie displays a wide range of flows and deliveries, often on single tracks. From the intro prophesying a thug revolution of sorts, gunshots are heard frequently, and most of the skits are little else than the sounds of drive-by shootings and AK sprays. The war theme is prevalent throughout “Thug Mentality 1999″‘s staggering 38 tracks, seven of which are skits.
Bone was definitely in a military mindstate circa 1999, and both “The Art of War” and 2000’s “BTNHResurrection” featured songs narrating epic battles and apocalyptic violence in light of the new millennium’s impending doom. Krayzie is a head-spinning rapper and an unusually talented singer, but more than anything else he’s a thug, and the listener will have a hard time losing sight of this fact over the two discs. The result is a sprawling and exhausting listen approaching 140 minutes with some quality music and some insignificant filler that has little business on an album, let alone a Krayzie Bone album. At the time of “Thug Mentality 1999″‘s release, Krayzie was hard at work establishing his ThugLine Records imprint, and many of the songs serve as introductions to his artists. Krayzie Bone had already explored the double-LP format with his group Bone Thugs-N-Harmony on 1997’s successful “The Art of War,” and two years later he returned with his first solo effort “Thug Mentality 1999.” As you might expect, guests are quite frequent and range from bona fide superstars (Treach, 8Ball & MJG, Snoop Dogg, Kurupt, Fat Joe, Big Pun, Cuban Link, Mariah Carey, E-40, Gangsta Boo, The Marley Brothers, and the rest of BTNH) to his underwhelming protégés (Bam, Relay, Niko, Knieght Rieduz, K-Mont, Asu, GraveYard Shift, Up In Clouds, Thug Queen, Mo!Hart, and Felecia). Thus we got “MP da Last Don,” “Wu-Tang Forever,” “Lost,” “The Element of Surprise,” “Kuruption!,” “Thugged Out: The Albulation,” and “My Homies”—good albums for the most part with inexcusable filler, bloated running times, unnecessary guest appearances, and worthless skits. After the runaway success of “All Eyez on Me” and “Life After Death,” the mindset seemed to be that given rappers’ high demand, they could put out epic two-disc packages of unfiltered studio sessions, charge somewhere in the twenty-dollar range for them, and go platinum moving half as many units as normally needed. Double-albums were the bane of gangsta rap in the late-90s.