It Takes a Thief by Coolio

It Takes a Thief, Coolio's debut studio album, dropped on July 19, 1994, and it did something rare for gangsta rap at the time: it cracked jokes. Where the genre ran on menace, Coolio came in grinning, loose and funny over rolling West Coast G-funk grooves, and critics loved him for it. He'd first made his name in WC and the Maad Circle.

The breakout was "Fantastic Voyage", a new track that took its title from an older hit, which climbed back up the charts itself in the process. MTV kept Coolio's video in regular rotation and the single rose to number 3 in the US. A few songs had already been heard before the album arrived: "Smokin Stix," "Can-o-Corn" and "Sticky Fingers" first surfaced in the film Poetic Justice. Gangsta's Paradise came next.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.