Top 19 -- Ice-T: OG

We've come to the part of the Top 19 where I no longer talked about these albums on Facebook. Even though they're still in the Top 19  I guess you can consider them honorable mentions or runners up to the Top 10 Facebook list.*

* This preamble seems highly unnecessary but so is this list.

One of the best things about being 17-years-old is that if you don't have your license yet, undoubtedly, you know someone that does. That means freedom. Freedom to go where you want to go. Freedom not to walk anymore. Freedom from asking your parents to drop you off somewhere. 

One of the best freedoms of an automobile free from parental control is the ability to play whatever you want whenever you want on the car stereo. I don't go down this road a lot, because while the Walkman was ubiquitous (I wrote all about it in my Public Enemy entry) it wasn't like today where every toddler has an iPad and headphones allowing them to crank whatever they want in their own bubble. Back in the day, you're listening to what your parents want to listen to and that was going to be powerfully lame*.

* There's one exception, is that is when my kids forget their devices at home and have to listen to my music. That's just ME giving THEM an education in awesomeness. 

I was one of the youngest of my group of friends and the laziest. I wasn't in any particular hurry to get my license; I finally got it when I was 17-and-a-half, more than a year after I was legally allowed to drive in Massachusetts. My thought process was, why bother? I wasn't going to get a car of my own. At parties, I didn't have to be the designated driver. Most of the time, at least one of my friends was more than up for picking me up and going somewhere together. So when I talk about listening to music in a car while driving, 90% of these remembrances are going to be about me as a passenger. 

When we were bored, we'd just drive anywhere. Sometimes, when we had a little money, we'd go to the malls in New Hampshire. Sometimes, when we were looking for things to do, we'd drive around our small town and see if anyone was hanging out at usual teenage haunts. In this case that was the Millyard, a parking lot across the street from the pizza place (Pizza Factory) where everyone congregated. But most times, if we were really bored we'd drive to Salisbury Beach. We'd park at our friend's grandparents house and waste time and money at the batting cages, playing pool, bubble hockey and video games while eating beach pizza. 

In the summer, we'd add Hampton Beach, which was two or three miles down the road, to the mix and add in trying to pick up girls too. We usually didn't get too far with the latter*.

* I remember myself and all of my friends being steamed that girls our age would barely look at us. They only seemed to be attracted to older guys walking the strip. "When we get out of college, we need to come back here and scoop some high school chicks," one of us said. And we all agreed. Thinking about that statement now? Ugh. 

While the passengers changed from night-to-night, the one thing that was consistent was the music. We all loved hip-hop, especially the hard stuff: Geto Boys, N.W.A. and Public Enemy. But the two cassettes that got the most action were the Beastie Boys' "Paul's Boutique" and Ice-T's "OG". 

In the early 90s, the view of Ice-T is much more different than it is today. The media made it seem like Ice-T was one of the most dangerous people on the planet. His raps were self-described true-life stories of his neighborhood and his history as a street hustler. I'm not sure how exaggerated his stories are, but it didn't matter. To us, they were exactly how things went down in South Central Los Angeles. 

Ice-T looked the part; jacked up, black hat, locs and a sneer. He didn't rap his lyrics, he spit them out syllable by syllable*. To us, he was another in a long line of people telling it how it really is. And we listened to "O.G." over and over and over again. 

* I think it's comedian Paul F. Tompkins who talks about this in his act, but Ice-T has a very profound lisp. I never noticed it before when I listened to his stuff, but that's all I can hear now. I think that if I had heard it back then, this might be a different blog entry. 

Not only did Ice-T rap, but he fronted a hardcore band called Body Count that had its single in the middle of the album. It was preambled by Ice-T talking about how rock n' roll isn't just white people music, it was pioneered by people like Little Richard and Chuck Berry and that he "happened to like rock n' roll." In a flourish he continued (and I'm doing this from memory, so forgive me if I mess up a word or two), "As far as I'm concerned music is music. And if anyone said that I sold out, they can basically suck my dick."

That song was pretty fucking great mostly because they sounded a lot like Black Sabbath. But this song really reached all of us. It showed that hip hop doesn't have to be its own thing, hip hop can be fused with rock and that can lead to some good stuff. Faith No More also did that in the early 1990s and lead to the Anthrax and Public Enemy collaboration, Rage Against the Machine before completely bottoming out with Nü Metal. That last thing wasn't great, but the inclusion vibe that these bands gave off wasn't too bad. 

Ice-T went on to make more albums, including a controversial one with Body Count which featured the single "Cop Killer" which made Ice-T a pariah for a summer, but this was the only one that I really loved ("Power" and "Freedom of Speech" were also good, but never got into the rotation like "O.G" did). When I hear songs like "Original Gangter" or "Midnight" or "New Jack Hustler", I'm instantly brought back to my senior year in high school. A year that I had some of the swagger of Ice-T because we were finally the top dogs of the school and because things were looking pretty good because we were ending one chapter and going to start a new one. 

It's ironic--especially in the light of recent events--that Ice-T's music represents a sense of freedom for me. Everything that Ice-T talked about was about how the government is keeping everyone down and that one has to take action to get power. But when I hear these songs and close my eyes, I think of a bright blue sky, plenty of sunshine and beaches  with my future as vast as the horizon. 

I am positive that's not what Ice-T had in mind when he recorded this album, but I also doubt that he thought that in 30 years people would know him for playing a cop on a "Law and Order" spinoff. Once a person enters the public conscious, things tend to change. 

The Battle of Los Angeles

Lights out

Guerrilla Radio!

Turn that shit up!

Lights out

Guerrilla Radio!

Turn that shit up!

Those aren’t the words of Hercules or the Angel or even Ice Man, but of Zack de la Rocha front man of the 90s group Rage Against the Machine. Why did I quote this band for this comic book? Because the title of Champions 9 shares the same name as Rage Against the Machine’s third studio album, “The Battle of Los Angeles”.

Am I suggesting that RAtM* are secret Champions fans? No. I’m overtly saying it and I think that Tom Morello and company owe someone at Marvel Comics a lot of money.

* When I was in my late teens and early 20s, I loved Rage Against the Machine. “They sang about real things, man. Important things. Things that we should be doing,” I’d argue to myself. And argumentative me was right, they were highly political and they did sing about a lot of things that were important and they did it in an aural pleasing (debatable, I know) way. But being pissed off all the time takes its toll, not only on the musicians but the listener too. I loved Public Enemy but after a while, it felt as if each album was an hour-long bitch session. Not everything has to be the “Humpty Hump” but at some point, you have to let your fans breathe. RAtM was a lot like that. I’m sure they’d take that as a compliment, which is fine.

Back to the Champions. We open up with Hercules and the Angel having to take on the Crimson Dynamo, the Griffin and the Titanium Man all by themselves because Ghost Rider took Rampage to the hospital, Ice Man is off with Ivan searching for the kidnapped Black Widow. Hercules is down for trading fists, but the Angel is understandably worried, so he falls back to crowd detail and lets Herc fight. Don’t worry, former California governor Jerry Brown got away, safe and sound.

The Scion of Zeus does a pretty good job with Crimson Dynamo and once the crowds are safe, the Angel handles the Griffin. At this point, Ghost Rider comes back and joins the fray. With an assist from Hercules (TEAMWORK!) he knocks the Griffin out with Herc’s mace. The cool thing about Hercules' mace? It has a big gold H on it. Proper. 

Hercules gets tired of fooling around with Crimson Dynamo and punches him out too. As this is going on, Warren Worthington III, aka the Angel, is goofing around with the Titanium Man. He kicks TM in the head, which causes the green Russian Iron Man to fall on Hercules, who is cooked.

When I was a kid, I remember the Titanium Man being a bigger deal than this. He used to go toe-to-toe with Iron Man and he was drawn as a bigger, more menacing villain than he is here. According to the Internet, he's over 7'1" and 425 pounds. He doesn't look like it here.  I don’t want to say that he’s used here for comic effect, but he’s not the hulking presence that he usually is. Though I guess if you have to fight the Angel, a writer can’t have WWIII fight the toughest dude from Siberia.

(Look at this dude. He should be able to make borscht out of the Angel.)

Titanium Man’s fall gets Ghost Rider’s attention, which allows the Griffin to get a jump on him. He slashes GR in the back and now Johnny Blaze is snuffed out. What’s strange is that Johnny Blaze’s head turns into a skull when he transforms into the Ghost Rider, why wouldn’t the rest of his body turn into a skeleton too? And if it did, then being slashed really shouldn’t do much, right?

Whatever. The Angel gets blasted out of the sky by Crimson Dynamo.

The weird thing about this whole fight is that the good guys were beating the crap out of the bad guys. They knocked them out numerous times, but like Chumbawumba, they always got back up again. On the other hand, as soon as the Champions get knocked to the ground, they are down for the count. I get that you have to make the villains a tough out, but this is a bit beyond the pale.

As the story moves on, Ivan and Ice Man are still on the trail of the Black Widow—via a black pearl (don’t ask). Ivan is all piss and vinegar about getting his Natasha back and freaks out when Ice Man suggests that they scout out the warehouse where BW is. He goes completely off the collective and accuses Ice Man of running out on his teammate. Ice Man is like, “The fuck are you talking about? There’s like a 30 foot drop from here to the warehouse, I just wanted to warn you about possible bad dudes and make an ice bridge. But if you want to figuratively and literally jump, fucking do it, Pops.”

At this point Titanium Man, the Griffin and the Crimson Dynamo show up with the three knocked out Champions (which seems like kind of a dumb name to call them right now, right?). They kick Ice Man’s ass pretty easily as Ivan uses the ice bridge to get to the warehouse.

Meanwhile, Black Widow and her former teacher, Alexi Brushkin, have broken free of their ropes and have gotten the drop on their captor Darkstar. They fight. And when Ivan breaks in through a skylight, they kick her butt. Unfortunately for them, the bad guy cavalry busts in with their smashed up friends. It’s then where the Crimson Dynamo rips off his mask and reveals that he’s Ivan’s son, Yuri Petrovich.

Not so talk-y now, are you Ivan?

For the second issue in a row, Bill Mantlo assumed the writing duties, putting Champions creator Tony Isabella on the sideline. I don’t want to rip the guy, but it’s for the better. The issues move a little bit quicker, a little smoother. There isn’t as much clunky exposition and it’s just a better book.

But I don’t want to be too hard on Isabella. For one thing, these books were coming out every other month and weren’t meant to be binge read. So, if you’re reading this book every two months, you’re going to need some reminders as to what happened in the last issue. Also, this is a new book filled with C-list characters, so the shortcuts that are in established books like the Avengers or the Fantastic Four or the X-Men aren’t there. Third, there’s an unwritten rule that every comic is someone’s first comic, so you have to thoroughly explain what’s going on every issue.

Some guys are deft at this, while other guys are a bit more clunky. Isabella did a pretty decent job of establishing the Champions’ universe—which is in Los Angeles while most teams usually make New York City their base of operations. So all-in-all; good job, Tony Isabella.

In terms of how this cover stacks up with others, it’s pedestrian at best. It’s not bad, but it doesn’t have the same panache as the others do.

Three out of five vested Angels.

Good Songs XIX

Box of Rain – Grateful Dead

Would? – Alice In Chains

No Excuses – Alice In Chains

Low – Cracker

Loser – Beck

Killing in the Name Of – Rage Against the Machine

Me and Julio – Paul Simon

50 Ways to Leave Your Lover – Paul Simon

You Can Call Me Al – Paul Simon

New Style – The Beastie Boys

Verse Chorus Verse – Nirvana

Spin the Bottle – Juliana Hatfield

Mrs. Robinson – The Lemonheads

Into Your Arms – The Lemonheads

L.A. Medley – Jane’s Addiction

Been Caught Stealing – Jane’s Addiction

My Time – Jane’s Addiction

Rock & Roll – Jane’s Addiction

Sympathy – Jane’s Addiction

Fee – Phish

Linger – The Cranberries

If this playlist or mix tape had a smell, it would reek of Keystone Light or Milwaukee’s Best. This tape was created sometime in the spring of 1994 and it features a lot of the songs that my friend Archie and I would listen to while we sat in our dorm rooms, played cards or Sega Genesis and drank.

When I went to Merrimack College in the mid-1990s, the school was in a strange place. It was beginning a transition from a small Catholic college that didn’t have many students living on campus, to what it is now: a medium-sized Catholic college with a good amount of kids living on campus. There were advantages to attending a small college: most people knew who you were (which could also be a disadvantage) and the classes were smaller. But there were disadvantages; mainly the social life could be incredibly dull*. 

* Merrimack did have fraternities, but there was no need for them. Merrimack was located in North Andover and Andover, MA and both towns had laws strictly forbidding frat houses – not that it would matter, the rent for places in those two towns were astronomical. Many of the fraternity houses were located in the next city over: Lawrence. Freshman year, the parties were fun but as we got older, the parties became lame. The frat dudes didn’t want us there, which is understandable since we were guys. Who wanted more guys at a party? We’d end up paying $5 for a cup of skunky beer, which was refilled after you waited in line for 20 minutes, the cops would inevitably show up around 10:00 and we’d have to go home. After awhile, it wasn’t worth the trip to leave campus.

There were parties in the on-campus apartments, but we were sophomore guys and never got invited because, again, who wants more guys at a party? And most of my friends didn’t have the cash or the fake IDs to get into Boston bars. Therefore we had to drink in our tiny dorm rooms—which by the way, were dry, so we had to sneak our alcohol past resident assistants working the front door, days in advance*.

* I’m not even going to front and nostalgically say how sweet each beer tasted because you had to work to bring it up to your room. It sucked. There was nothing fun or romantic or cool about sneaking beer into your dorm room. Take this from a person who was busted doing this.

Archie had good music taste and we listened to a lot of Jane’s Addiction that spring – he was a big fan of the band. And I became obsessed with the group too, especially their first CD. Their first CD makes up a bulk of this tape and I’m surprised that I didn’t include “Jane Says” because I listened to that song a lot when I was a college sophomore.

Like I wrote about during the last entry, “L.A. Medley” hit me in a couple of areas: it comingled my old obsession (the Doors, most of the song was an “L.A. Woman” cover) with my new obsession (Jane’s Addiction), it was from a live bootleg CD (so exciting, so rare!), Perry Farrell was cool (he was the face of Lollapalooza) and the band had broken up (so I could wallow about missing them – I saw them play live twice in the coming years). Basically it had everything 1994 Byron was looking for in a group.

And I still think that 1994 Byron is right as Jane’s Addiction is a great group to listen to—especially their pre-Kettle Whistle/pre-reunion stuff. “Been Caught Stealing” was their break-through hit and was on heavy rotation on MTV back in the day. When I first saw it, the video seemed strange in that it featured a bunch of weird-looking people* ripping off food from a dimly lit and dirty supermarket. Added to that montage were quick shots of Farrell with nylons stretched over his head singing, which is an image that’s difficult to forget.

* Looking at the video now, the people weren’t really strange looking, they looked like folks you run into every day. Twenty five years ago, that looked “strange” because MTV was wall-to-wall beautiful people. On MTV, a person with normal body proportions and regular facial features looked grotesque and odd.

When grunge and alternative music exploded, I don’t know if Jane’s Addiction ever really got the mainstream credit that they deserved and that’s probably because they weren’t in the spotlight for too long. Both them and the Red Hot Chili Peppers were both LA-based bands that didn’t kowtow to the glitzy, hair-metal music that was popular at the time. Their sound wasn’t as polished, it was a bit more funky and sludgy at the same time (if that makes sense). The guitars were still fast, but the song lyrics were a bit more thoughtful, a bit more real than anything that Poison or Motley Crue were putting out at the time.

Jane’s Addiction broke up just a hair before the alternative music wave crashed into the mainstream. If they had stayed together, would they have been as popular as the Red Hot Chili Peppers? I don’t know. But it is interesting to think of a world where the RHCP broke up in 1991 and the JA kept making music together for over 30 years.

The Paul Simon tracks aren’t me thinking that I was Merrimack College’s answer to Lorne Michaels, but those songs were the ones that we listened to most when we were drinking. Now that I have children, “Me and Julio” has taken on a different connotation. The song was included on “The Muppets” (the Jason Segal remake – which was actually quite excellent) and my kids begged us to listen to this song over and over and over again. A request my wife and I complied with because, this song is awesome.

The Nirvana and Beastie Boy tracks are from an album called “No Alternative” which collected many of the best acts of the day—there was at least one song from every one of my favorite bands (Beasties, Nirvana, Soundgarden, the Breeders, Matthew Sweet) at the time, except for Pearl Jam—and the money was donated to AIDs relief. The Beastie Boy song is a live version of “The New Style” and the Nirvana cut is one of the “hidden tracks” that bands used to do back in the day.

A hidden track referred to a song being at the very end of the CD. It was never listed on the track list but sometimes, if you let a CD continue playing after the end of the last song, it would pop up. Sometimes, you’d have to listen for up to 20 minutes to get the hidden track, which was annoying (and scary – if you forgot that there was a bonus track) as hell, but it was a precursor to DVD Easter Eggs.

I told you that the 90s were a magical time!

It’s not often that something lives up to your imagination, but for one brief speck of time: I felt as that I had correctly foreseen my college experience. I made it through high school with decent grades, but I never studied for one test (aside from chemistry – God, I was terrible at chemistry). My philosophy was: I paid attention in class, I took notes, I did the homework; if I didn’t know the material at that point, then studying wasn’t going to help me. This is the rationale of a very lazy person.

However, I knew that college was going to be a different ball game, as I’d have to get serious and study because things were going to be much more difficult. The summer before college started, I was lying in my bed thinking about going to school outside of Amesbury for the first time and I began romanticized about late-night walks home from the library after cramming for a test. I had seen this scene a million times in countless movies about college and it seemed so cool: broken pencils and balled up papers, coffee cups stacked to the roof, the tell-tale signs of a person working his ass off to get a good grade. There was something very satisfying about it.

Fast forward to December of my freshman year, I was through studying for final exams (quick aside: not as glamorous as I envisioned!) and I was on my way home. It was snowing, but not very hard, there was a nip in the air and I was listening to the Cranberries “Linger” on my Walkman. And as I was walked down the street lamp-lined path to my dorm, it occurred to me that this was how I pictured this moment many months ago. Maybe not exactly, but the feeling of accomplishment that I imagined was exact. I felt good that I actually studied, I felt like I accomplished something, that I was finally becoming a responsible person.

After coasting through life and not really giving a shit, it was an amazing feeling that I did care.  

I once read that the sense of smell is linked most strongly to memory. But I think that a close second is your hearing, because every time I hear “Linger”; I feel that chill in the air, the snow falling gently on my face, the feeling of solitude and that sense of pride that one gets when they work hard and they’re prepared for the next day’s test.

As I was listening to that song this morning, I thought things may not be that great today, but they will be better tomorrow. It always is.