The Block Brochure: Welcome To The Soil 1

Not everything works on the Bay Area rapper's sprawling three-volume, 60-track offering, but not only are none of these songs bad, two-thirds of them range from good to mind-blowing.

From his beginnings as a background player in ’90s gangsta rap—always well-respected, but never a commercial force—E-40 emerged as Bay Area rap’s most influential artist, the public face of the scene and a pioneer of a frenetic regional strain of hip-hop called hyphy. Without compromising his core Cali sound, the…