Jermaine Dupri
Y'all Know What This Is... The Hits
Universal



Jermaine Dupri has never managed to get the profile here in Australia that he enjoys in the States, something that this collection will do little to remedy. Unlike other, better-known, producers/rappers, his own albums have never been overly successful and he hasn't developed long-term working relationships with iconic artists or helped produce any all-out classics. It would be easy to add his own awkward high-pitched rapping to the reasons why he's never really had a break-out hit, but every other producer/ rapper has their own shortcomings on the mic and besides, his biggest hit featured two prepubescent teens mostly repeating a single couplet.

This collection opens with two of his most recognisable songs, the trunk rattling Welcome To Atlanta featuring the irrepressible Ludacris and Kriss Kross' Jump, his most successful production to date commercially. Money Ain't A Thang with Jay-Z was a perfect representation of late Nineties period flossing, and the superficial track sounds like the one on which papa smurf is most comfortable, favouring as it does style over substance.

As a rap producer, Dupri's favoured production style is a repetitive, bass-heavy Atlanta bounce, and if this collection exposes anything it's that his sound hasn't really evolved in 15 years. Where he has grown is by increasingly producing R'n'B, but he's never developed his own aesthetic in this field, tailoring tracks to the popular style du jour. As a result the Usher track here (Confessions Part II) sounds like an Usher song, the Mariah Carey song (We Belong Together) sounds like a Mariah Carey song, and so on, without any identifiable style linking the them together. While there may not have been a Jermaine Dupri collection on the market before this one, all 'Y'all Know What This Is' proves is that we didn't really need one.

Alexis Buxton-Collins