Yes: Hell Hath No Fury is 100 tons of steaming hot shit. It is filthy and brilliant and one of the more significant cultural happenings in a fat minute or two. Every one of the twelve tracks pressed to this disc is fire, and not hot like a good single but an incendiary rethinking of what mainstream hip hop can sound like. In a couple of crucial ways, “Dirty Money” sounds different than any other track on this unconscionably fresh record. The diced electric guitar sample that runs up and down the spindly spine of the beat runs contrary to the gravity-defying logic of the other sounds here. “Dirty Money’s” nearest neighbors, for example, are the dissonantly shimmering “Ride Around Shining” and the dense synth blooms of “New World,” the latter case exacerbated by Pharrell’s paper-thin, atonal chorus. Pusha T and Malice do not threaten to kill me on “Dirty Money”; they do not leer like the ice-cold boogey men that dominate much of the rest of the album. If I played this at a party, people might dance; if I played “Trill” at the same party, the stereo would detonate, destroying Ohio instantly.

What “Dirty Money” has in common with the rest of Hell Hath No Fury is a blinding sense of invention. The Clipse’s profane humor is at the forefront here: “Brain like Teri / Face like Eva / I ain’t forgettin’ none of those other housewives neither,” and the dusty crash samples that hit twice at the end of every eight bars renews the beat. That guitar tone, familiar and melodic, is in this setting as alien and disorienting as the depths-of-hell synth burbles that make “Chinese New Year” so stomach-churning. But there, as with “Dirty Money,” form matches function, so that the lyrical angle of the emcees always syncs with the sonic angle of the Neptunes. So the lyrical theme of “Dirty Money” -- that is, that money unfairly earned is more gleefully spent by the Clipse’s cadre of female companions -- evokes the rapper-as-new-rock-star cultural transaction as well as the beat does.

That they pull this off twelve times in manners that, both lyrically and sonically, have not been done before is, of course, what we’re all flipping out about. “Dirty Money” is one example of this. I know of eleven more. This track was picked at random to be reviewed today; a more full analysis of the cultural impact of this recording will follow closer to the proper release date. Authorities say hyperboles are being prepped as we speak.

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