Rakim, Kurupt and Masta Killa stack the album THE GODBODY with guests

Rakim, Kurupt and Masta Killa released their joint album THE GODBODY on 18 September, a pairing that puts three separate strands of rap history on the same sixteen tracks. HotNewHipHop reads the record through that split: Rakim's golden-era standing, Kurupt's West Coast roots and Masta Killa's Wu-Tang background, held together rather than merely collected.

The record was trailed in stages. DPG-Wu-Tang, Wu-Tang-DPG went out first and states the premise in its title. Rock Ya Body followed, widening the circle to Daz Dillinger, Ghostface Killah and Raekwon, which is four Wu-Tang and Dogg Pound names on one song before the album had even arrived.

The guest list on the finished record keeps going. Snoop Dogg appears on a remix of Rabbit, whose original features Mac Shawn 100. KRS-One and Kool G Rap share Still Ill!. Kokane opens the album on Goin' Down. Buckshot turns up on Thelonius with Rim and Trigga, Jamall Ray sings on Is It Love, and Mic King closes things out on a remix of Hallelujah.

The structure is odd in a way worth noticing. Three of the sixteen titles are remixes or second versions of songs already on the record: Rabbit, I'm Good and Hallelujah each appear in an alternate form. On a project assembled from this many contributors, that reads less like filler and more like a way of getting extra guests onto material that already existed.

HotNewHipHop's argument is that the result avoids the usual trap. Records with this many veteran names on them tend to arrive as compilations, a series of features with no centre. THE GODBODY, the outlet says, works as a deliberate bridge between regions and eras instead, and the sequencing supports that reading more than a list of names would.

One correction to our own earlier note. It recorded that no tracklist had been published; the full sixteen-track list is printed on the HotNewHipHop page, along with every feature credit. What genuinely is missing is production. Not a single producer is credited anywhere in the report, and no label is named, on a record whose appeal rests partly on how it sounds next to the catalogues it is drawing from.

The album has been trailed here twice already, first when the three shared Goin' Down in August and again when a second single arrived ahead of the LP at the end of that month. Release dates as they are confirmed go on the release calendar, and more from the genre sits on the hip-hop hub.