Act Like You Know

In an attempt to sell MC Lyte to a broader audience on her sophomore album, the people at Atlantic paired the Brooklyn rapper with Bret Mazur and Richard Wolf, a team of dance music producers who'd recently become famous for their work with Bell Biv Devoe. The pair’s uptempo house-infused productions were an odd match for Lyte’s style, which was intrinsically raw and homegrown. Regardless of her producers’ choices, she appears as hungry and focused as ever on “When in Love,” “Act Like You Know,” and especially “Eyes Are the Soul,” which contains three vignettes of urban souls in crisis: a victim of AIDS, a crack addict, and a teen who's forced to abort a pregnancy. It’s unfortunate that Lyte's label was reluctant to let her be hardcore hip-hop, because Act Like You Know is at its best on the songs produced by 45 King, one of the realest and most respected New York beatmakers. Lyte comes alive on “Like a Virgin” and “Big Bad Sister,” but the best of the lot is “Kamikaze,” as fearsome and sinister as anything on Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, which was being recorded around this time.