Happy 20th Anniversary to Masta Ace’s third solo studio album A Long Hot Summer, originally released August 3, 2004.
I gushed about the brilliance and career longevity of Masta Ace in my Albumism tribute last year for the 15th anniversary of The Show (2008) by Ace’s group eMC, so I won’t do it again here. Instead I’ll jump straight into why A Long Hot Summer is one of the revered rapper’s best records.
Masta Ace specializes in concept albums that make his discography feel like an acclaimed TV series demanding to be heard in order to appreciate it best. There are running themes through most of them, whether that be the state of the hip-hop business (1993’s Slaughtahouse and 2001’s Disposable Arts), or growing up and coming of age in Brooklyn (2012’s MA Doom: Son of Yvonne and 2016’s The Falling Season.) Each album has a story arc with every track and skit like an episode building up to a season finale. Masta Ace is still making excellent concept albums now, most recently dropping the solid A Breukelen Story (2018) and Richmond Hill (2024) with his A Long Hot Summer collaborator, Marco Polo.
You can listen to these albums as standalone products, for sure, but it seems like an injustice to Masta Ace not to listen them chronologically. He often mentions in interviews how he is working on plays for theatre companies and screenplays for films. It’s hardly surprising then that his albums are written and constructed like something that would work on screen. It’s also probably why a song of his appeared in one of the most acclaimed episodic TV masterpieces of all time, The Wire.
To really understand A Long Hot Summer fully, it’s best to check out the excellent Disposable Arts first. That said, Masta Ace uses a non-linear storytelling structure with these two albums, as A Long Hot Summer is actually a prequel to Disposable Arts.
The plot of A Long Hot Summer is simple. Ace plays the role of an aspiring rapper trying to make it in an industry that likes to ignore raw talent. He gets mixed up with a shady character named Fats Belvedere and eventually winds up in jail (Disposable Arts examines what happens when the same character is released from imprisonment).
What makes it great is Masta Ace’s rich and vivid storytelling. His characters have full personalities and real depth, and his lyrics on each track move the story along at just the right pace, with skits and interludes in between that act as Martin Scorsese style voiceovers.
Listen to the Album:
But you need more than just good writing and a solid plot to make a cinematic album—it must also have a well-crafted score. This is what made Prince Paul’s A Prince Among Thieves (1999) and Politics of the Business (2003)—two of hip-hop’s most acclaimed concept albums—so good. Both albums feature some of Paul’s best work, with everything tied together masterfully.
Masta Ace appeared on Politics of the Business as a guest emcee, and you can tell that it inspired him to make sure A Long Hot Summer had a soundtrack worthy of the story. He achieves this by deploying beats from several prolific producers including 9th Wonder (“Good ol' Love”), DJ Spinna (“Soda & Soap”), Marco Polo (“Do It Man”) and the highly underrated Dug Infinite (“Big City,” “Wutuwankno”).
I may be over-reaching and guilty of hearing things that aren’t there, but to me it genuinely feels like the production taps directly into the story of A Long Hot Summer, as though the beats were created specifically for the project with guidance from Masta Ace, and not just chosen off the peg from a beat tape. Take “Da Grind,” produced by 9th Wonder protégé Khrysis, for instance. The thick beat plods along like heavy footsteps, perfectly in time with the story of an emcee that works very hard on his art for little in return.
Unlike the aforementioned Prince Paul albums that are full of guest features (a necessity due to Prince Paul not being a rapper), A Long Hot Summer includes only a selection of other artists (The Beatnuts, Jean Grae, eMC, plus Ace’s former Masta Ace Incorporated co-star, and wife, Leschea), and they are mainly used only for hooks or background vocals. The stories Masta Ace tells on his album clearly come from a personal place, and the lack of features is all the better for it, allowing the artist to focus fully on the narrative without much distraction.
LISTEN: