J-Zone Presents: The Old Maid Billionaires: Pimps Don't Pay Taxes

As the CEO and creative force behind Old Maid Entertainment, New Yorker J-Zone has cultivated a small but loyal following with a pair of independently released EPs showcasing his crate-digging prowess and wicked sense of humor. With its emphasis on women and money and J-Zone's interrelated problems with each, Pimps Don't Pay Taxes, the full-length debut from J-Zone and OMB sidekicks Huggy and Al-Shid, doesn't break new ground thematically for J-Zone or hip-hop. Instead, it offers countless inventive variations on the time-tested theme of being horny, broke, in love with hip-hop, and mad at the world. In "The Trojan War," J-Zone picks up a hottie in his Pinto, obsesses over Lucy Liu, decides to forego prophylactics indefinitely, and engages in a Me And Him-meets-The Fight Club exchange with his enraged penis, all in the course of just under three eventful minutes. The next track, "The Bum-Bitch Ballad," finds J-Zone indulging his mile-wide misogynist streak with a darkly funny attack on wheatgrass-drinking, head-wrap-sporting "fake Maya Angelous" who take issue with his less-than-empowering lyrical content. J-Zone could get by on the strength of his savage lyrics alone—not since Licensed To Ill has quasi-adolescent belligerence been so raucously entertaining—but his skill as a producer makes Pimps Don't Pay Taxes especially remarkable. A dense, complicated, and kinetic collage of left-field beats, pre-rock samples, canny snippets of dialogue from movies and television, and conceptually ambitious skits, Pimps Don't Pay Taxes sounds like a charmed collaboration between Madlib and a crankier, less cerebral MC Paul Barman. But there's more to J-Zone than just Mensa-clever punchlines and inventive production work. On "I'm Fucking Up The Money," for example, J-Zone sneaks sharp socio-economic observations into his tale of just barely getting by in New York on the strength of stolen cable, counterfeit money, and bootleg CDs. With 21 tracks squeezed into 50 tight minutes, Pimps Don't Pay Taxes sounds like underground hip-hop's sleeper hit of the year.