Pain Is Love

Like his NYC thug-rap compadres Jay-Z and DMX, Ja Rule thrives by managing a delicate balance between extremes. His rough-and-tumble tales of ghetto life are delivered in a raw, desperate rasp, but produced with a pop slickness (courtesy of Irv Gotti) that makes them slide down like candy. Ja’s also got something neither DMX nor Jigga can boast: a spiritual side. It’d be easy to dismiss his higher concerns as the sort of dilettantish god-speak we usually get from entertainers, but his third album maintains the moral compass that his first two displayed without ever getting preachy. Tracks like “Dial M For Murder” and “Down Ass Bitch” offset gangsta clichés with a shrewd conscience, as Ja’s tug between extremes proves continually compelling. In reality, Pain Is Love is not appreciably different from his last outing, the multi-platinum Rule 3:36, which wasn’t appreciably different from his debut, Vetti, Venni, Vecci. Whether you call such a track record increasingly dull or impressively consistent depends on your point of view.