Mystikal sounds something like James Brown in his ’70s prime. “A lot of people tell me that,” says Tyler. “I’m honored, ‘cause he’s the man.” But he also sounds like any number of old-time shouting-and-singing African-American preachers, a comparison that doesn’t surprise Tyler either. “Definitely,” he says. “I was raised in the Baptist Church.” If it seems odd to hear this preacherly delivery on Mystikal’s current hit single “Shake Ya A–,” what can you say? He’s a complicated guy. The album entered the Billboard 200 this month at No. 1, largely on the strength of “Shake Ya A–” and its heavy-rotation, booty-intensive video. (If you listen to the heavily edited rap on the radio, which these days is a bit like watching TV through a sheet of Swiss cheese, you know the song as “Shake It Fast.”) But people who bought this CD sheerly as a raunchy party record with some off-the-wall wit–who but Mystikal would rhyme “Advil” with “keepin’ it that real”?–have ended up with a lot more than they’d bargained for.

“Let’s Get Ready,” Mystikal’s first album since what he says was an amicable split with his producer-mentor Master P, delivers all the sex, dope smoking and pro forma obstreperousness that hard-core rap fans expect. But in the warmhearted “Family,” he evokes 1930s Louisiana and pays tribute to his mother, his grandmother and what seems like a hundred or so cousins, all by name. In the harrowing “Murderer III,” he rants for vengeance against the man–a scion of New Orleans’s musical Neville family–who confessed to killing his sister in 1994 but later had the charges dismissed. (Tyler credits God with helping confine his revenge to the studio.) And the chilling “Ain’t Gonna See Tomorrow” is flat-out gospel (“God, give me my purpose/Jesus, break these chains”), a monitory meditation on mortality whose three verses escalate in vividness and intensity: from ubiquitous bad news (“The water ain’t no good, the grass don’t grow”) to domestic violence (“Baby, I’m so sorry… When I put my hands on you I was wrong”) to his own near-fatal car crash (“This can’t be happening… I saw the helicopter and the ambulance”).

The consistently inventive music on the tracks, crafted by a half-dozen different producers, complements this head-snapping range of mood and subject: a minimalist four-note clarinet hook on “Shake Ya A–,” some Near Eastern-sounding stringed instrument on “Jump,” funk bass, kettledrums and tolling bells on “Ready to Rumble,” minor-key piano and softly wailing siren on “Ain’t Gonna See Tomorrow.” And will the beats get you shaking your moneymaker (as they called it, perhaps even more offensively, back in the day)? Trust. You might find a fresher, more satisfying pop album this year than “Let’s Get Ready”–we’ve still got a couple of months–but don’t count on it.

All that having been said, some of the people who should hear Mystikal–fans of classic soul and gospel music, say, or even of jazz and blues–are going to be put off by the rough language and the single’s strip-bar milieu, with “playas and pimps” commanding “ho’s” to bend over and “show me what you’re workin’ with.” For some people, that track would be a deal breaker even if Otis Redding and John Coltrane had come back from the grave to guest on it; they’ll dismiss as incomprehensible hip-hop weirdness Mystikal’s thank-you in the CD booklet to God, “the head of my life,” for “keeping Your protective and comforting arms around my family and myself.” But what great Southern performer–from Hank and Elvis to Little Richard, Sam Cooke and Al Green–doesn’t exemplify the combustible mix of the sacred and the profane that powers Mystikal’s angry, anguished voice?

When Mike Tyler says his grandmother is proud of “Family,” you naturally wonder: have the women in his family also heard the rougher stuff? “Oh, yeah,” says Tyler, “they know about all of it.” If the women who love him really take Mike’s many-mindedness in their stride, maybe people who love classic American music could cut Mystikal some slack. Because for one thing, this is classic American music. Or haven’t you heard?

Mystical’Let’s Get Ready’ Jive