My Ghetto Report Card is the ninth studio album by American rapper E-40. It was released on March 14, 2006, by Warner Bros. Records, Asylum Records, BME Recordings and Sick Wid It Records. My Ghetto Report Card was supported by two singles: “Tell Me When to Go” featuring Keak Da Sneak, and “U and Dat” featuring T-Pain and Kandi Girl.

Background

E-40, a rapper born in Vallejo, California, released eight solo albums prior to My Ghetto Report Card dating back to 1993. In the early 1990s, he was part of the Vallejo rap group The Click.[1] Thanks to regional popularity of his independently released single “Captain Save a Hoe”, E-40 got his first major label signing with Jive Records in 1994.[1] By the late 1990s and early 2000s, E-40 began doing guest features on Southern rappers’ albums, such as MP da Last Don by Master P, My Homies by Scarface, and Kings of Crunk by Lil Jon and the East Side Boyz.[1]

Recording

With E-40 as executive producer, the album features production from Bosko, Lil Jon, and Rick Rock among others.[2][3][4] Critics noted the influence of Southern crunk sound. For AllMusic, David Jeffries remarked: “Lil Jon seems to be adapting to the Bay more than E-40 is going South.” Ryan Dombal of Entertainment Weekly said the album “speeds up crunk’s creeping scurrilousness while toning down its violent undercurrents.”[5]

In an interview with MTV News, E-40 described the title as a reflection of having “straight A’s across the board” and “d[oing] nothing foul in the game” in his music career.[6]

The Guardian music critic Angus Batey described opening track “Yay Area” as “one of the handful of truly experimental, daring and generally aurally flabbergasting rap tracks released so far this century” in a 2015 profile of E-40.[7]

Impact

Due to the success of “Tell Me When to Go” and hyphy-themed songs on radio and MTV, the East Bay Express and Oakland Tribune speculated that My Ghetto Report Card would become E-40’s mainstream breakout album.[21][22] By May 2006, Jim Harrington of the Oakland Tribune observed that a concert sponsored by local radio station Wild 94.9 “crowned E-40 as the new king of hip-hop.”[23] Writing for the Oakland-based East Bay Express, Rachel Swan listed the album among the best of 2006 and called it “the most elegant in a spate of hyphy albums released this year.”[24]

RYM Review

if you ever wanted to hear someone say “feels like i’m in your pussy when you’re suckin my dick” through a vocoder then well have i got the album for you