Top 19 -- Living Colour: Vivid

On Facebook I was asked to list my top ten all-time albums that most influenced me. Since I can't list anything without a huge explanation, this is it. Not only that but I'm writing about my Top 19 instead of my Top 10. 

Here's what I wrote on Facebook today, "Here's another quick story: I loved this album when it came out. L-O-V-E-D this album. I know that I've said this about every single album that I've written about in the last ten day, but I must've listened to this album, bare mins, 130,000 times. I was obsessed with this album and this band. One day at my house, my friend turned on "Cult of Personality" and I started headbanging (and with the size of my noggin, you shouldn't do that) and I literally put a portion of my bed through the floor. After being blown away by the video on MTV, I remember going to the Liberty Tree Mall, marching into a Record Town and demanding "Vivid". When the clerk said he had no idea what Vivid was or who Living Colour was, I got really indignant and said, "Some day you will!" That was the type of fire that this band inspired in a meek, socially awkward 14-year-old. This band. This was MY band. I knew no one else who liked them as much as I did."

Pretty much from the first time I saw the video for "Cult of Personality", I knew that Living Colour was fucking awesome. There was something so different about this song, it rocked like crazy, but at the same time they weren't singing about looking for nothing but a good time or girls, girls, girls. This band was singing about something important? Smart? Philosophical? All that, really. And that's what hit me. I had no idea what a cult of personality was. It seemed interesting though, there are images of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy and Josef Stalin and Gandhi. 

The more I found out about it, the more I was like, yes, this is smart. And listening to this song makes me feel smarter. This album must be amazing. And once I finally got it, I was right, it was fucking amazing. I loved each song. From the heart of "Open Letter to a Landlord" to the poignant "Funny Vibe" (which was my first introduction to Chuck D and Flavor Flav or Public Enemy) to the Talking Heads cover of "Broken Hearts", this was something that I wasn't used to hearing. 

I saw this band twice--once they play "Vivid" from start to finish--and they were some of the best shows that I have ever seen. I remember the first time and I couldn't believe that I was at the Paradise in Boston, so close to the band. It was like a dream come true. Really. 

The one thing that I remember about Living Colour is that on the day that the Red Sox won Game 4 in the 2004 ALCS, I was supposed to go the Pats/Seahawks game in the afternoon and then haul ass to the House of Blues across the street from Fenway to watch a Living Colour/Public Enemy show. My plan was to watch the rest of the baseball game at one of the Landsdowne Street bars before heading back to Aly's place in Brookline. 

The night before the Sox got bombed by the Yanks, 19-8 putting them in a 3-0 hole. I was so depressed I disavowed my Sox fandom,I cancelled on the Patriots game, never went to the PE/LC show (a double bill that would have broken my brain in 1990) and didn't watch the Red Sox (out of protest) until the eighth inning. After the Sox won that game, I was back on the trolley and watched them roll through New York and then St. Louis as they won their first World Series since 1918. 

I'm bummed that I didn't go to the Pats-Seahawks game but I really sad that I never saw the Public Enemy/Living Colour show. That sucked. 

There were some great things about growing up when I did, but one of the shitty things was an absence of information. With the internet, we take this for granted that if we want to read something about a thing that we like all we have to do is pull out our phones and go to Google. Boom. Instant information. And a lot of it is true!

In the 80s, you had to really search for stuff. With the other things that I was into (comics and baseball--sports in general), it was easy. There was sports new every day on TV or in the paper, plus I had subscriptions to Sports Illustrated and Sporting News. Comics were a little tougher, but there were tons of magazines devoted to comics. And since I liked Marvel Comics, it was easy to keep up with the latest news. 

But if you lived in Amesbury, MA; you weren't going to get a lot of information on your favorite band. Maybe there'd be a story in the Globe or the Herald if the band was going on tour or had just released a new album. Maybe you could find a blurb in a Rolling Stone. But that was about it. The metal magazines didn't cover Living Colour and neither did the pop mags. There were no zines anywhere I lived. 

When you look through the rose-colored glass of nostalgia, you might be tempted to say that this was "magical". You had to work for your information and it made it so much better. But that's bullshit. I like being able to check stuff out when I want, wherever I want. 

I doubt that I'd love Living Colour any more than I did when I didn't know much about them. And maybe it was cooler that there was a little mystery about Corey, Vernon, Muzz and Will; but I don't know. 

One last thing about this album, and it's very embarrassing to me, is the art work. It was obvious that this was some sort of free-flowing abstract-y kind of painting. But it didn't hit me until many, many, MANY years later that the green shape in the middle of the album cover is NOT Africa. It's a man's head.  And the black shape in the top left hand corner are not fingers. They're just weird shapes. 

My thought when looking at this picture with the red lines emanating from the green shape, was that Living Color was making a statement that all of culture comes from Africa. And that the black fingers were showing how that culture touches us all. 

I know. I know. 

Good Songs VIII

Kiss of Death – Dokken

Burning Like a Flame – Dokken

Epic – Faith No More

Falling to Pieces – Faith No More

Up All Night – Slaughter

Fly to the Angels – Slaughter

Never Enough – LA Guns

Ballad of Jayne – LA Guns

Cult of Personality – Living Colour

Glamour Boys – Living Colour

Type – Living Colour

Love Rears Its Ugly Head – Living Colour

Don’t Close Your Eyes – Kix

Cold Blood – Kix

Kickstart My Heart – Motley Crue

Doctor Feelgood – Motley Crue

Don’t Go Away Mad – Motley Crue

Same Old Situation – Motley Crue

Down Boys – Warrant

Currently, I am a marketer. Technically, I’m a product marketer and that can mean a lot of different things at a lot of different companies. However, the bulk of my job is understanding my product, crafting a message for that product and making sure that message gets to the buying public. Unless you have amazing brand recognition (Apple, Coca-Cola, McDonalds) getting that message out there can be difficult.

But that’s what I love about my job. I love determining what the product’s message and value props are going to be and figuring out a way to present it in a way that will make people reach into their wallets and pay my company their hard-earned money. That’s probably a crass way to put it, but that’s basically what my job boils down to.

One of the things that I would love to discover (and this is a discovery, more than an invention, thought I assume it could be argued either way) is an algorithm that will correctly predict the whims of the public. On a macro-level, I’m not sure if you need something like this. Normally, people will gravitate to something that has a ton of hype around it. Hype costs money, ergo if you have a ton of money you can get your hype and your customers. The trick is creating something worthwhile enough so that the hype can die down a bit and people will still actively seek out your product. The bottom line is, money helps.  

The algorithm that I would like to discover would operate  on the micro-level. Why do some towns and cities prefer Pepsi over Coke, Budweiser over Coors Light, Burger King over McDonalds. These hamlets have their regional favorites and there has to be a reason why. If you get enough of these micro-levels together, you get a chunk of the macro-level and start competing with the big guys.

The first two songs on this tape* sorta relate to this micro-level way of thinking.

* The next three Good Songs tapes were all created at the same time. They were broken up into Rock, Rap and Mix. As you might be able to tell from this tape, the first 14 songs are paired – a duo of songs from one tape. Except for some reason I really liked me some Motley Crue at this point, so I doubled the duo of Dr. Feelgood. Anyway, I’m not sure if I like this gimmick, it reminds me of those old “Two for Tuesdays” programs they’d run on the local radio station where you’d get two songs from the same artist. I have a feeling that I was influenced by MTV who was playing video blocks of the same type of music during the summer of 1990 and 91. At this point in my life, MTV was the Pied Piper, I’d pretty much buy anything that was in heavy rotation on MTV.

This micro-level of marketing refers to the band Dokken and my specifically high school. From any objectionable point-of-view there is no difference between Dokken and Ratt and LA Guns and Poison or any other mid-80s, LA heavy metal band. Like those bands, they were an amalgam of Led Zeppelin/Van Halen/Black Sabbath-influenced rock that placed a premium on looking a certain way (PRETTY!) and acting a certain way (obtuse and obnoxious). Also like those bands, Dokken didn’t do anything extraordinary. The lyrics weren’t anything special, the musicianship was mediocre and even the way that the singles were released (rockin’ one first, ballad second, whatever third) was all the same.

They were unoriginal soliders in a time where corporations were pumping out bands who were rockin’ by numbers. They were a disposable band that was an example of a successful musical formula.

For some reason, Dokken took ahold of my high school. Or at least the band took ahold of the cooler guys in my grade, which meant that the band Dokken had a heightened sense of awareness at Amesbury High School. It wasn’t “Dokken or Die” but I seem to remember that there were a lot of cafeteria conversations about whether Dokken guitarist was “Awesome”, “Fucking Awesome” or “Wicked Fucking Awesome”. On days when “Mr. Scary” was extra loud, there were some debates about whether Lynch was legitimately better than Jimi Hendrix or Jimmy Page.

I’m sure that every moderately popular band had an unexplained loyal following at every high school in America, so I don’t mean to single my high school out. I’m sure you could replace Lynch with Rikki Rocket or Richie Sambora or Mick Mars and the same conversations where taking place all throughout America at that time.

As a young person you have no real idea of what came before you but you have an endless amount of time to figure out where you heroes will rank. I thought that Jose Canseco would sail into the Hall of Fame on his first ballot, things happen. But what I’m most interested in is how did one high school in the middle of nowhere, Massachusetts have a slavish devotion to a completely forgettable and totally middle-of-the-road rock band? I’ve thought about this question for nigh 20 years and I don’t think that I ever figured out a good answer. Maybe an algorithm for predicting the trends of teenagers is dumb because there is too much randomness, but I don’t believe that. There should be an answer somewhere.

It’s been a long time since I’ve listened to Dokken* (actually, I do unironically enjoy the second song on this tape, “Burning Like a Flame”) but it’s interesting how hearing the opening riffs to “Kiss of Death” brings back those old high school memories. I never made a big deal of liking or disliking Dokken (in fact, I know I got “Back For the Attack” from the Columbia House tape club for a penny) but I’m not made of stone. I heard a bunch of people talking about a band, I listened to them a few dozen times, I thought that maybe I could get cool by osmosis, it didn’t work that way and I moved on. High school is a strange time.

* In the late 90s, MTV ran a retrospective Where-Are-They-Now special (this was pre-everyone having the internet and knowing where everyone is) on the heavy metal heroes of the late 80s. An interview with Dokken lead singer Don Dokken was surprising in just how unaware he was about his band’s place in the world was. He said that his band’s managers worked with Metallica at the time and would beg him and his mates not to fall in the trap of the LA scene of too much makeup, too much Aquanet, too much handkerchiefs, basically too much opulence. Be like Metallica they said and don’t follow the trends. The band ignored them and Dokken wistfully said—and I quote, “If we listened to them, we could have been Metallica.” No you wouldn’t, Don. No you wouldn’t.

I will not apologize for the Faith No More double-dip, though. Both of these songs were in heavy rotation on MTV and rock radio in the early 90s though not too many people remember the band itself. They had a modest hit later in the decade with the ironic cover of the Commodore’s “Easy (Like Sunday Morning)” but other than that, you didn’t hear too much about them. It’s easy to understand why because the group was ahead of its time. From the rock/rap melding to the band members’ detached, almost ironic sense of being, FNM had no business showing up in the self-absorbed stratosphere of the early 90s.

If you asked a person to tell you something about FNM, a majority would talk about the video for “Epic”, specifically the slow-motion video of a fish who had fallen out of its bowl and was gasping for breath. It wasn’t a particular shocking image, but for some reason it resonated with a lot of viewers. So much so that MTV News felt it was their duty to ask the band about the video. Lead guitarist Jim Martin glibly said, “Well, the fish deserved to be filmed too.” This answer was interesting on many levels in that a. it was a foolish “controversy” to be overly concerned about b. the visuals don’t matter, it’s supposed to be about the music. And c. the answer itself almost a non sequitor in that the interviewer obviously wasn’t concerned about the fish’s popularity but rather the fish’s well-being. Martin brought a sense of absurdity to the interview by turning an incredibly dumb question’s perception completely askew.

I watched a lot of MTV News and saw a lot of celebrities interviewed and that’s the only one that I remember because frankly, I don’t think that anyone else at that time could have given the same response.

Aside from Motley Crue and Living Colour (who I wrote about a few entries back) the rest of the bands are completely anonymous. A few quick hitters on what I remember from them:

Slaughter: the band that girls really loved, mainly because of Mark Slaughter. I thought that they might be kinda cool because I heard Gene Simmons “discovered” them and Gene let Mark wear his leather jacket in the “Fly to the Angels” video. Here’s a potentially embarrassing fact, if I get drunk and I have access to YouTube, I will probably play “Fly to the Angels” at least a half-dozen times. BTW, the line from "Up All Night", "Oh I wish we could stay up, 24 hours a day!" is perhaps the whiniest line ever song by a band that wanted to look cool or tough. Man, that was terrible. 

Kix: the name sounds like Kiss, but the band sounds like Great White. In fact, I get those two bands confused all the time. I owned the tape these two songs came from and I don’t think that I could name any other song these guys did.

LA Guns: I wonder if the Jayne from the “Ballad of Jayne” is the same Jane from Jane’s Addiction’s “Jane Says” (despite the spelling differences)? Probably not but  that last sentence holds the records for most times I’ve ever written the name Jane in any permutation of the name. I remember hearing that lead guitarist Tracii Guns was in a band with Axl Rose and that’s how the name Guns N Roses came to be. The story goes on to say that Axl kicked Tracii out and replaced him with Slash, but kept the name. Wikipedia says this story checks out, so good work AHS rumor mongers! Anyway, I always felt sorta bad for Guns and thought that he had to be kicking himself that he wasn’t actually in the multi-platinum band that was partly named after him.

Warrant: This band is usually short-hand for being part of the terrible rock scene that is being covered with this cassette. And for good reason, I suppose. I have no idea what a Down Boy is and I don’t remember caring too much. The one thing that I found refreshing about lead singer Jani Lane is that in that same MTV retrospective that I referred to earlier, he talks about going to the band’s record company in 1992 and seeing a huge poster of “Cherry Pie” hanging over the secretary’s desk. A year later, the poster was replaced by Alice In Chains. He then thought, “Crap. We’re probably in big trouble.”

He certainly was.

  

Good Songs IV and V

Good Songs IV

Forever – Kiss

Open Letter to a Landlord – Living Colour

Bring the Noise – Public Enemy

Gas Face – 3^rd Bass

Nothin But A Good Time – Poison

I’m That Type of Guy – LL Cool J

What It Takes – Aerosmith

Women – Def Leppard

Back in Black – AC/DC

The Humpty Dance – Digital Underground

Welcome to the Jungle – Guns N’ Roses

911 is a Joke – Public Enemy

It Take Two – Rob Base and DJ Easy Rock

Lick It Up – Kiss

Wild, Wild, West – Kool Moe Dee

Turn This Mutha Out – MC Hammer

Antisocial – Anthrax

Angel – Aerosmith

Just a Friend – Biz Markie

2-Hype – Kid N’ Pla

Good Songs V

Up All Night – Slaughter

Fight the Power – Public Enemy

Crazy Nights – Kiss

Before we get to the songs, I put in the words "Good Songs Mix" into the old Google machine and one of the images that returned was this picture of two confused Olsen Twins. It's as good as any image I can think of.

Another two-for-one deal Good Songs post. Again, I can’t figure out why I would only put three songs on a 135-minute tape. I’m sure that the Slaughter-Public Enemy-Kiss lineup was too much awesome for anyone to take any more rocking or rapping.

The band Kiss is an interesting choice for these Good Song editions as I decided to add three songs from the band on this tape and a quarter. In the first entry I spoke a bit about my misplace middle school nostalgia and I would bet that the inclusion of three Kiss songs is a continuation of that trend.

Judging from the songs that were recorded, my guess is that I created this tape in either the late summer or early fall of 1990. During that time, Kiss wasn’t doing so hot. Yes, the ballad “Forever” entered the Billboard Top 10 (peaking at number 8) and was co-written by early 90s superstar Michael Bolton (yes, that Michael Bolton). But aside from the hard-core Kiss Army, no one really cared about the band at all during this time. They were an old, boring band that wasn’t doing anything at all. In one of the lines from the penultimate song in this collection, “Crazy Nights”, Kiss frontman Paul Stanley whines, “And no one is going to change me, because that’s who I AM! Ugh!”

I’m not sure why he added the Ugh, but Stanely couldn’t have been more wrong with the rest of his statement. Kiss was constantly changing in a desperate attempt to keep up with the times.

The song “Lick It Up” was released in 1983, about seven years before it was included on this tape, and this song was also the first video where Kiss took off their makeup. It was their ultimate trump card, because up until then, the vast majority of their fans had never seen what Gene Simmons or Paul Stanely or Eric Carr or Vinnie Vincent (the latter names, replacements of band founders Ace Frehley and Peter Criss) looked like sans grease paint. The unmasking ceremony on MTV was a hit and “Lick It Up” (the album and single) did pretty well. However with their trump card played, Kiss lost a sense of mystery, a sense of what made them unique from other bands. They were just four ugly guys warbling over loud guitars – Journey without the harmonies. As such, each album released after “Lick It Up” did progressively worse. According to the book, “Kiss and Sell” (which was written by the band’s financial manager) the group grew more and more desperate to appeal to the young demographic; dumping money into their concerts, following what the popular bands were doing (like Def Leppard and Bon Jovi), hiring people like Michael Bolton to write songs for them. In the early 90s when America’s youth’s tastes turned to the Seattle scene, Gene Simmons grew a goatee and the band made a heavier, grungier album. Unfortunately nothing really worked for the band until they found an ace up their sleeve (HA! Kiss pun!) got Frehley and Criss back into the group, slathered on the paint and repackaged themselves as a Greatest Hits band.

The point isn’t to draw attention to a bunch of old men desperately trying to stay hip, but answer the question: “Why is there so many Kiss songs on this tape?” Like I said, I think it has to do with misplaced nostalgia. I had a friend named Mike who was obsessed with Kiss. Every square inch of his bedroom was covered in Kiss posters, clipped photos and scores of Kiss videotapes and paraphernalia. The dude knew every word to every song and more than that, knew the meaning behind the words (which wasn’t difficult, since this is Kiss we’re talking about). But I thought that was cool, Mike had already had HIS band. And his band had dozens of albums, tons of pictures and years of mythology to comb through.

Kiss, and similar bands with a long history, allow newer fans a short cut to becoming super fans. A new fan of an old band doesn’t have to wait for their favorite group’s next album to come out, there are already 12 albums in the store to buy. Fans of older bands don’t have to hunt high and low for mentions in Rolling Stone or Hit Parader or Spin, chances are good that a cover story was written about them in the last few weeks – or better yet, maybe a book or a documentary. They can be just as knowledgeable about the band as a 20-year follower, because they both have the access to the same knowledge.

When I was younger and the Internet didn’t exist, I didn’t want to spend the time searching for information. I was impatient waiting for new records, articles or TV specials. Maybe I wanted to co-opt Kiss as my band but deep down I couldn’t because they were Mike’s. There’s a saying, “No one knows that they’re living in history”. I wanted the history of a band (even a crappy one like Kiss – sorry Mike), a band with history makes you feel like you’re part of something bigger. I made a serious go with Living Colour but they only released one album by this point and there is only a finite amount of times you can listen to “Glamour Boys”.

There are two songs that made it to the first three volumes of Good Songs*: “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns N’ Roses and Poison’s “Nothin’ But a Good Time”. WTTJ is easy to explain, it’s an awesome song by an awesome band, which at this period in  time, was probably the biggest band in the world. And “Welcome to the Jungle” isn’t the only GNR song on the Good Songs docket; “Sweet Child O’ Mine”, “Paradise City” and “Mr. Brownstone” all make appearances.

* For this argument, Good Songs II and III are part of the same collection as are Goods Songs IV and V.

However the inclusion of “Nothin But a Good Time” on these tapes is quasi-interesting in that it’s the only Poison song I include over these three volumes. Was Poison a one-hit wonder? Nope. They had a ton of songs that were as popular, if not more (“Every Rose Has It’s Thorn”, for example). Did I only own the NBaGT cassingle? I did not. I actually owned not one, but both of Poison’s tapes at the time.

I think why NBaGT gets a spot on these tapes is because I genuinely liked the song. I sincerely thought that this was going to be an anthem for my generation, much like Kiss’ “Rock N’ Roll All Nite” was for a previous generation. And I think the band agreed with me because at the beginning of this video, the down-in-the-dumps dishwasher was listening to Poison’s version of the Kiss classic on his radio before his jerkass boss told him to turn it off. Of course the dishwasher kicks a door and there’s Brett Michaels and the boys ready to play “Nothin But a Good Time”.

Anyway, I was like that girl in “Mean Girls” (this was on a few nights ago, which made me think of this analogy) who was trying to make “Fetch” a thing. I was trying to make “Nothin But a Good Time” a thing, but I should have stopped trying to make “Nothin But a Good Time” happen. It never happened.

Also, I remember mowing the lawn one day listening to “Look What the Cat Dragged In” on my Walkmen when a female neighbor of mine asked me what I was listening to. When I told her, she laughed and said, “No one listens to Poison.” And that was the last time (other than “NBaGT”) I ever listened to Poison.

But what was happening (at least if this tape can be believed) was I was waist-deep in hip pop. From the East coast with Kool Moe Dee and LL Cool J to the West coast with Digital Underground and MC Hammer, it looked as if I was all about busting a move (even though there is no Young MC on this tape). I was not all about busting a move. In fact, unless I was pretty hammered, there was no way I was going to dance. Mostly because I’m terrible at dancing—either drunk or sober.

I did not own the Kid N’ Play tape, CD, cassingle or album and I don’t think that I know anyone who did, so I’m not sure how I got ahold of it for the Good Songs mix, but I’m glad I did. The lyrics are pretty awful (“Last night I had it my way with a fun girl who was def”) but the beat is insanely catchy. I know that most people will say that Rob Base’s “It Takes Two” might be the most dance hypnotic beat out there, but this is a solid runner-up.

I will talk more about hip hop in the ensuing editions of Good Songs, because looking ahead it’s all-rap, all the time. But I did want to end this entry with a few sentences on three songs:

Def Leppard – Women: on a CD (Hysteria) that had a ton of chart-topping songs and was an absolute beast for three years, this song may have been my favorite. I’m not sure why. I think it’s partly because it’s different than the other songs on the disc and partly because a friend of mine had a Def Leppard t-shirt that was designed to look like a comic book. The sinister-looking robot on the back of the shirt was giving a presentation to other evil robots and said W.O.M.E.N. was an acronym for “Worship Our Master’s Every Needs”. It was never clear to me if the female population sent the evil robots to Earth to battle men in order to enslave them, but I was a deeply closeted comic nerd and thought it was cool.

Anthrax – Antisocial: I do like this song, I like it a lot. I like the video where the band chases around their weird looking mascot and pulls off it’s head and it’s Ozzy Osborne in the suit with the oversized latex head. But I guarantee that I added this song because Public Enemy’s Chuck D yelled, “Wax is for Anthrax” in “Bring the Noise” and I wanted a winking joke. Yes. This was some of the crap I thought of when I had nothing else to think of.

Aerosmith – Angel: this is such a brutal, terrible, stupid, awful song; I could barely get through the playing of it this morning. What utter tripe. I’m retroactively embarrassed by including it on this tape. I’m sorry to everyone I’ve ever known. I will not apologize for “What It Takes” though. That song kicks ass.

Good Songs II and III

Good Songs II

Turn This Mutha Out - MC Hammer

Shook Me All Night Long – AC/DC

Sweet Child O’ Mine – Guns N Roses

Open Letter to a Landlord – Living Colour

It Takes Two – Rob Base and DJ EZ Rock

Rock N Roll All Nite – Kiss

Love in an Elevator – Aerosmith

Hysteria – Def Leppard

Principal’s Office – Young MC

Welcome to the Jungle – Guns N Roses

Wild, Wild West – Kool Moe Dee

Wild Thing – Tone Loc

Scared – Dangerous Toys

Nothin’ But A Good Time – Poison

I’m That Type of Guy – LL Cool J

Lick It Up – Kiss

Who Made Who – AC/DC

Cult of Personality – Living Colour

Pour Some Sugar On Me – Def Leppard

Bust A Move – Young MC

Good Songs III

Paradise City – Guns N Roses

Going Back to Cali – LL Cool J

Devil Inside – INXS

Janie’s Got a Gun – Aerosmith

Funky Cold Medina – Tone Loc

Glamour Boys – Living Colour

Back in Black – AC/DC

Love Bites – Def Leppard

Mr. Brownstone – Guns N Roses

I listened to two editions of Good Songs today. I’m not sure exactly why (the linear notes in the Good Songs tapes are completely nonexistent—it’s as if I never thought about the future), but for some reason Good Songs III is only a half of a tape. This may be because I bought two 90 minute tapes and had only 135 minutes worth of good songs in my collection (perhaps), something better came along and took me away from taping (not likely) or I was just lazy (most definitely).

Whatever the reason (definitely laziness), I decided to combine both of these volumes into one entry because it makes the most sense and it’s just easier. I probably created these tapes in the late winter of 1989/early spring of 1990, or about eight-to-nine months after I unleashed Good Songs I on an unsuspecting world. And by unsuspecting world, I mean myself and my stereo – these tapes were never publically consumed.

In the mangled, unrefined high school brain of an adolescent male, I wanted these tapes to be heard by my peers, but at the same time I definitely didn’t want my peers to hear the mixes. When creating these tapes, I’d often daydream about the adulation that I’d get from my peers “Wow! What a mix! Rock and rap? What a maestro!” And in my more outlandish fantasies, it was me who came to the rescue of a school dance gone awry with my Good Songs mix tapes.

“Don’t worry girls, a slow song is coming up real soon. You can all have a dance,” I would think.

But I would never dare put this out there for fear of public ridicule. “Young MC? Dangerous Toys?  Poison? These songs are terrible! You suck,” is how the flipside of the aforementioned daydream usually played out.

In high school and the subsequent years after graduation are interesting (especially in a pre-internet world) in terms of my media consumption in terms of how it reflected on my person. On one hand I wanted to be unique, have a few outlying tastes that no one else has. That’s what makes me who I am and it differed me from the sea of people listening, watching and discussing the same thing. 

At the same time, I didn’t want to be an outlier or an outsider, listening to stuff that no one else liked. There was no community, no sense of belonging; I really wanted to be sorta like everyone else. Of course, with the way the internet connects everyone’s likes now, this wouldn’t be a problem that I’d have faced.

One of the bands that really spoke to me and was “mine” was Living Colour. I don’t know what it was about them, but I latched on to them the first time I saw “Cult of Personality” on MTV. Aside from the fact that they were black* and they were playing hard rock (heavy metal? I don’t know) their video was completely different than what was being played on the channel at that time.

* I hate to say it, but it was a big deal to me that there was a black rock band on MTV and that’s what probably attracted me to them – I thought that they were incredibly talented but they didn’t look like everyone else, which got me thinking that they were probably an underdog story, championed by some lonely A&R rep somewhere. (That’s not true, by the way, Mick Jagger loved them and produced their records and had them open for the Stones on their Steel Wheels tour). I’ve always loved an underdog story—even one that only I perceive as such—so that’s why I identified with their music so much. At the time I didn’t understand that rock was once full of black musicians and that historically, the race of Living Colour shouldn’t have been a big deal.

Their videos were paired down, nothing like the big budget spectaculars of  their contemporaries like Motley Crue or Poison or Bon Jovi. “Cult of Personality” were four dudes on a sound stage, with a couple of pieces of stock footage to accentuate the lyrics. And the lyrics were (seemed?) deeper than their contemporaries too. They talked about gentrification, despots and the ruination of the lower-to-middle class. Their guitars squealed just as loud as their rock brethren, but it seemed like they were smarter.

And that was good, smart is always good. It also didn’t hurt that their music was pretty good too and was part of a trend to more thoughtful popular music. Although I didn’t know it at the time, Living Colour was my first foray into the alternative musical landscape* that was going to monopolize the playlists of the next decade. 

* Along with Jane’s Addiction, Ice-T and a bunch of other bands, Living Colour was a part of the first Lollapalooza. That’s the gold standard for 90s alternative nation!

I have to admit, I’m not a big AC/DC fan. I like them well enough to listen to them when they pop up on the radio and I’d say that I know a good portion of their back catalog despite owning two tapes: “Back in Black” and “Who Made Who” and rarely ever seeing a video on MTV*. The reason why I know them so well is because I grew up on the border of Massachusetts and New Hampshire. In high school, most of the radio stations I listened to were the New Hampshire rock stations. And each station played at least one AC/DC song every hour.

* I remember losing my damn mind when I saw AC/DC’s “Shook Me All Night Long” on MTV one random February afternoon. I immediately called up my friend Jesse to discuss this HUGE event. He didn’t think it was that big of a deal – he was probably right. Like I said, I was never a big AC/DC fan and MTV used to play hundreds of videos every day—who cares. It must not have been easy to be my friend in high school.

After hearing AC/DC so many times, I was worn down and asked for those tapes for Christmas. I listened to them a bunch of times, liked them okay and the ultimately forgot about ever listening to them again. What was the point? They were on the radio all the time. At one point in my life, I may have gone every day for five or six straight years with hearing at least a snippet of an AC/DC song. I know Brian Johnson’s voice better than my own mother’s.

After Aerosmith came back from a decade of drugs and debauchery with “Walk This Way” and “Permanent Vacation”, they were everywhere. Living in Massachusetts, it was doubly impossible to escape from their clutches. I never loved Aerosmith, I almost felt as if I should own their tapes out of consolation; I lived in Massachusetts, they’re popular, I needed to get with the program.  

As far as later Aerosmith goes, “Pump” was a pretty decent album. There was a bunch of filler on it, but the singles were decent enough to mine. And they followed the formula of most heavy metal bands at the time, release a rocking song as your first single and then a slow, more serious ballad as your second single. And that’s what Aerosmith did here.

It’s kind of difficult to slow dance to a song about a girl who was molested by her dad and then shoots him, but it was a different time, I suppose. Aerosmith spent a lot of money of their videos and really embraced the whole rock/MTV star thing. On every MTV News show, Steven Tyler was giving his opinion about something and I think that ubiquitous helped to make Aerosmith even more popular. When their videos weren’t on MTV, the group’s front man was talking about AIDs or Led Zeppelin or reading George Bush’s lips.

He was one of the first entertainers to realize that being a rock star takes a lot more than knowing how to sing or play guitar, you have to always put yourself out there and when people aren’t listening to your songs, they need to see your face and hear your voice. It’s all about the synergy – which is a far dirty, dirty word than Steven Tyler has ever skatted.

After my dalliance with DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince on my first Good Songs tape, I really jumped into the poppy side of rap. MC Hammer (this tape was made before “Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em” was huge), Rob Base, Young MC, LL Cool J, Kool Moe Dee and Tone Loc all make appearances on this tape.

At the time, I was probably under the impression that I was pretty cool to include stuff that was seen daily on Yo! MTV Raps. But most of these tracks are pretty whack.

Of the nine hip hop songs, “Going Back to Cali” is probably the best one. Though I wouldn’t fault you if you argued for “It Takes Two”. I can remember seeing “It Takes Two” for the first time on MTV and just being hypnotized by it. The beat, the hook, Rob Base’s delivery; I am not a dancing man at all, but damn it, that song made me want to get up and do the running man.

And the way it spread through the school was organically. It’s not like today where you can show someone a video on your phone, if you liked a song, you asked another person if they had heard it before.  If they did—BOOM—instant connection. If they didn’t, you had to explain it to them, describe the beat, spit out a few lyrics, talk about the video. Maybe, if you were lucky, you had it on tape in your Walkman and they could hear a snippet. But talking about new music was almost like passing a secret or saying a code word.

My interest in rap was still at a pretty elementary level at that point in my life. I just thought that it was music to dance to. I had no idea that it could be used for social commentary. More on that in the entries to come.