Unreleased Slick Rick, Chapter Five

Like I said in my last entry, it seems J-Love lowered his standards between the first and second version of his Legends vol. 2 CD as far as what can be considered "Unreleased." The second time around he included "The Sun," with Ghostface Killah, Raekwon and RZA as an "Unreleased" track.
 
"The Sun," along with another song that doesn't feature Slick Rick called "Good Times," was originally slated to appear on Ghostface's 2002 album, Bulletproof Wallets. Both were eventually removed from the final release version of the album, but not before the clean promo copies were pressed and released to the public.

Okay, so that sounds pretty worthy of being labelled "Unreleased," right? After all, it was only put on the clean, radio version of the album that wasn't really made available to the public. That was the thinking, I'm sure, when Archives Inc. rereleased this on vinyl one year later on their Ghostface Killah EP (which also features "Good Times" and one or two "original mixes" of songs that were different on the clean promo than the funal album).

So, now it's been released twice. Once as a promo-only vinyl pressing (though it's not terribly rare... you can still score copies of this online for less than the original sale price), and once as an independent (bootleg? just how legit are Archive Inc.'s releases, anyway?) vinyl EP, which is still easily available... pick it up from ughh.com if you're interested. But that's still pretty "Unreleased" as far as the average consumer is concerned. I mean, it's not like this was put out on a mainstream vinyl and CD release that's still in print and available wherever new music is sold, right?

Oh, wait. Actually, this song was included on Ghostface and Trife da God's double album, Put It On the Line, two years later. Go ahead and order it new or used from Amazon; it comes with a bonus DVD of a Ghostface stage show recorded live. Now, I don't know how much more released a song can get than all that.

The song itself is just OK. The beat and hook are kind of monotonous and most of the lyrics are a bit goofy, with each MC rapping about the sun. Ghostface says, "Yo, the sun can never be pussy; he always come out. He'll sit right there, even if you pull your gun out." Slick Rick steals the show with easily the best delivery; but lyrically, it's still album filler quality. And frankly, they should've removed RZA's bit all together.

And actually, in 2004, Wu-Tang producer/DJ Allah Mathematics released a mixtape called The Next Chamber with his own remix of "The Sunn" (as he spells it), where the instrumental - if not the lyrics, which are naturally unchanged - is far superior. So, really, there are a lot of other buying options for this particular song, all of which are preferable ...if you think it's worth bothering with at all.