Fishscale is released

Why it matters

Fishscale came out March 28, 2006, on Def Jam. It is Ghostface Killah's sixth solo album. The production is split between J Dilla (who died seven weeks before the album dropped), MF DOOM, Pete Rock, Just Blaze, and Ghostface himself. The album is a coke-trade narrative LP, structured loosely as a series of vignettes about the Stapleton Houses in Staten Island, where Ghost grew up. This is one of the great Ghostface solo albums, on a short list that includes Ironman (1996) and Supreme Clientele (2000). Ghost's writing on Fishscale is at its most associative and high-velocity: he writes in stream-of-consciousness paragraphs that move between vivid concrete imagery and total non-sequitur and back again. "Shakey Dog," "Kilo," "Whip You with a Strap," "Underwater," "R.A.G.U." with Raekwon. Fishscale is the album most critics agree marked Ghost's late-career creative renaissance and is still treated as the post-2005 high-water mark in his catalog. You should hear it back-to-back with Supreme Clientele. The writer is, by Fishscale, fully Ghost: there is nothing else like the voice on rap records.