Old-school hip-hop, which builds its sing-song raps atop samples of old funk and soul singles, may be on the way out, but in its twilight days it has yielded one more brilliant album, Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise. Coolio, the Compton rapper once known as Artis Ivey, creates tape loops of the catchiest sections from old songs by Smokey Robinson, the Isley Brothers, Billy Paul, and Herbie Hancock, and then raps his ghetto slice-of-life stories atop those loops. It's a familiar formula, but Coolio makes it fresh again, coming up with monologues strong enough to make us forget the original songs and get lost in his narratives. Moreover, Coolio drops his rhymes so they fall perfectly on the beats and even the melodies of the samples. --Geoffrey Himes