The Penthouse Players Clique wasn't a full-time group, but rather, they were a studio project boasting such well-known gangsta rappers as
DJ Quik,
AMG, and the late
Eazy-E. Unlike
N.W.A's
Straight Outta Compton,
Ice Cube's
Death Certificate, or
Ice-T's
Power,
Paid the Cost doesn't have a cohesive sociopolitical message. The goal of
the Penthouse Players was simply to have some profane, over-the-top fun, and they do so with uneven and unfocused but sometimes entertaining results. While the lyrics aren't all that violent, they are rude, crude, and sexually explicit. In fact, tunes like "Pimp Lane" and "Trust No Bitch" make a point of being as vulgar and offensive as possible. Intellectuals in the hip-hop press generally trashed
Paid the Cost, calling it a lowest-common-denominator release and denouncing much of it as a pointless exercise in sexism for the sake of sexism. But then,
the Penthouse Players didn't record this album to please hip-hop's intelligentsia.
Paid the Cost isn't remarkable, although it's sometimes amusing and fun if you have a taste for off-color humor. ~ Alex Henderson