Good Songs XXVIII

Crumbs on the Table – D-Nice

Informer – Snow

I Left My Wallet in El Segundo – A Tribe Called Quest

We Want Eazy – Eazy-E

OPP – Naughty by Nature

Murder Rap – Above the Law

Principal’s Office – Young MC

Let the Rhythm Hit ‘Em – Eric B. and Rakim

2-Hype – Kid N’ Play

Playground – Another Bad Creation

Straight Outta Compton – NWA

Funky Cold Medina – Tone Loc

Doowatchalike – Digital Underground

Mistadobalina – Del the Funkee Homosapian

Fight the Power – Public Enemy

It Takes Two – Rob Base and DJ Easy Rock

New Jack Hustler – Ice-T

The Bomb – Ice Cube

How Ya Like Me Now? – Kool Moe Dee

The Gas Face – 3^rd Bass

This is the last “Good Songs” tape that I own, which means that this is the last Good Songs blog entry that I am writing. And it’s appropriate that I’m ending this nostalgia quest with a tape that is absolutely reveling in nostalgia. I created this tape in 1999* with the intent of driving around, reminiscing about the good old days.

* I’m pretty sure I subtitled this Good Songs tape “Middle School” because the songs on it definitely weren’t new school and they weren’t old enough to be old school—and by extension, neither was I. I also created a heavy metal mix tape, called Hairy Velveeta (it was cheesy hair metal, get it?) but that tape and a few other Good Songs tapes were stolen from my car one day. Hopefully that thief created a blog where he comments on tapes he stole from cars parked in Revere, MA. If he does, send me an email and we can link blogs!

It was around this time in my life where I began to slow down my consumption of new music. There were some new bands that I liked and that I’d make the effort to listen to, but new music wasn’t as available to me anymore. I had a legit career where I wasn’t able to sit in front of MTV* and be spoonfed the latest hits.

* It was also at this point that MTV decided that playing music 24 hours a day wasn’t paying the bills, so they began focusing on TV shows rather than music. If you read the oral history of MTV entitled, “I Want My MTV” you’ll understand exactly why the channel had to do that.

The radio stations that I listened to became more segmented and I concentrated mostly on rock. The late 90s were a bad time for rock music as third-generation Grunge and nü-metal was really coming into focus and bands like Creed, KoRn, Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock were the most popular acts in the country. And I got aboard that train for a little while, but that music was terrible. It was all aggression with zero intelligence, after awhile it became very boring.

Around this time I created this tape, I moved back to my parents’ house in Amesbury and perhaps I was inspired (traumatized?) by living in my old bedroom that I went back into my “old studio”. It’s not a bad mix and does a better job of capturing what I was listening to back in the day than the previous other mixes did combined.

I was a bit surprised that older mixes didn’t have any Ice-T on them because my friends and I listened to Ice-T’s “O.G.” as much as any other tape we collectively had. And I mean we listened to him a lot, even going back to his old tapes like “Power” and “Iceberg” and newer ones like “Home Invasion” and his rock/rap band: “Body Count”—which were both horrible albums.

The one thing that I never noticed was Ice-T’s very prominent lisp. It wasn’t until comedian Paul F. Tompkins brought it up on a Podcast did I start listening to Ice-T’s old stuff in a new light. The juxtaposition of a tough guy and his posturing spit out through a lisp is hilarious.

In the fall of 1991, Naughty By Nature’s “OPP” was everywhere. The title of the song was sly and subtle (at least sly and subtle for an early 90s rap song) and the background beats are awesome. Especially when you layer the Jackson 5 “ABC” cut on top of it. It was a monster hit that produced parodies (MTV got on board with “Are You Down With MTV” that featured the gang from Yo!MTV Raps rapping), t-shirts and headlines alluding to the question. It was NbN’s world that year and we were all just living in it.

I was surprised that “OPP” or at the very least “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright” (their second single, which sampled Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds”) wasn’t included on any Good Songs tapes. Glad to hear that I corrected that mistake.

Since I’ve written about every other song on this tape, that’s pretty much it for this edition. I didn’t exactly stop create mix tapes in 1999, I moved on to creating mix CDs and they were really bad. And not bad in a way that it was fun to listen to some of these bad Good Songs mixes. They were bad in a God-I-never-want-to-listen-to-this-garbage-again, I mean Fred Durst was involved. The fact is, I have the CD booklet in my car and there have been times where I’ve tried listening to the tracks and it’s not good. Maybe in 10 years I’ll revisit, but I’m not ready to do so today.

In the next few days I’ll probably do a Good Songs wrap up where I figure out which track was on the most tapes (early bet is something by Lenny Kravitz, probably “It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over”) and some other odds and ends.

Regrets? I’ve had a few. The one thing that I wish that I had done differently was make “Funky Cold Medina” the last song on this tape. Why? Because it was the very first track on “Good Songs I” and that would have made for some nice symmetry. Good Songs could have been a Rust Cole infinity circle, man. Start with “Funky Cold Medina” and just keep on going and going and going and going until you get back to the drink that knocks you out. But that’s the thing about life and endings, it is very rare that you understand that something is going to end and that you have the foresight to have it end in a place where it began. 

Thank you for reading and thank you for the comments. For me, this has been a really fun writing exercise and an interesting trip down memory lane. I hope that you enjoyed it too. 

Good Songs XV

Enter Sandman – Metallica

Pass the Mic – Beastie Boys

So Whatcha Want – Beastie Boys

Jump Around – House of Pain

Milky Cereal – LL Cool J

Scenario – A Tribe Called Quest

Humpin’ – College Boyz

Panama – Van Halen

Deep Cover – Dr. Dre featuring Snoop Doggy Dog

Always Inta Something – NWA

It Ain’t Over (Till It’s Over) – Lenny Kravitz

Baby Got Back – Sir Mix A Lot

Back in Black – AC/DC

Cold Blood – Kix

This was a fun mix to listen to this morning as there were a lot of high-energy, bouncy songs that took me back to when I was in college.

Aside from “One” which was one of the first tracks on Good Songs I, I didn’t put too many Metallica songs on the Good Songs. It’s not that I didn’t like them, but they ubiquitous in the 1990s. They were all over the radio, on MTV, popping up on award shows and late night talkshows, their faces on every music magazine on the newstands. For as anonymous and mysterious* as they were in the 1980s, Metallica was the exact opposite for the last decade of the millennium (or Willennium, as Will Smith once called it).

In other words, I didn’t need new places to listen to Metallica. In fact, I was probably trying to escape them at this point in my life.

* Metallica’s self-titled Black album was released in August of 1991 and “Enter Sandman” was a monster single. It was still a big deal when Metallica released a video (I believe that this was their second video ever) and it was in heavy rotation. Anyway about a month or so later, I was at a high school dance when the DJ played this particular song (don’t ask, it’s typical Amesbury High School) and I was talking to a friend of mine. He said, “I love that Metallica got some kid to say some Satan stuff in the middle of this song. That’s so awesome!” He was referring to the “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” prayer that bisects the song. My friend may have been an idiot or Metallica was so mysterious that no matter what they said, it was considered “dark and spooky”. Maybe this was what it was like to be a Led Zeppelin fan in the 1970s.

For a tape so heavy on hip-hop, this was an interesting song to open with. I know that many “true” Metallica fans malign this CD, but it’s still excellent. And there are certain parts in this song that still hit like a truck smashing a little boy’s bed. That’s not too bad for a tune that will be celebrating its 24^th anniversary in August.

There are some songs you can remember exactly where you were when you first heard them. One of those songs for me was “Jump Around” by House of Pain. The August before I left for college, my mom and dad decided that the whole family needed a day out. For one reason or another, we rarely did this. I’m not sure whether it was because my brother and I were involved with sports or what, but the last trip that I could remember the entire family going on was our disastrous trek to Cape Cod in 1987. So this particular day stood out.

It was a really burning hot day and my folks decided to take us to Fanuiel Hall in Boston. We hadn’t been there in awhile and the thought was that we’d have a good time. My brother and I were sullen teenagers – and in truth we were probably very nervous about our new schools (he: AHS and me: Merrimack College) – so Jay and I broke off from our parents for a couple of minutes to check out the record store. We nosed around our favorite sections when I heard it, the now familiar “BAH! Bah, bah, bahhhhhhh!” followed by a bunch of squealing horns. I looked around and a bunch of the city kids just started pogoing—or jumping around.

Jay looked at me, I looked at him and we just shrugged. My brother walked out of there with a copy of House of Pain’s CD, which we listened to. A lot.

I can’t blame those kids for dancing, the beat is infectious. It makes you want to get out of your seat and jump around. And it wasn’t just Boston city kids doing it, this was one of THE songs of 1992/93. Like the four faces of Metallica, it was everywhere that year. It was played at house parties, bars, dances; anywhere drunk kids were, that song wasn’t far from being loaded into a CD player. The song was good then and it’s still good now.

I wonder if Everlast still talks to Ice-T and asks him if there are any parts for him on Law and Order? Everlast was a member of Ice-T's crew, "The Rhyme Syndicate". I wonder if any of Ice-T's old crew asks that question? I probably would. 

One last thing about House of Pain, the group combined with Bart's nerdy friend has given me the only name I use in fantasy sports: Millhouse of Pain. Thank you Everlast, I appreciate the set up of a good pun.  

Speaking of great, fun songs; “Panama” is the only Van Halen song on any Good Songs tapes. And that’s okay because this is prime Van Halen. The guitar playing of Eddie Van Halen, the harmonies of Michael Anthony and the boozy, over confident vocals of David Lee Roth make it (for my money) the best VH song around*.  

* Alex Van Halen’s drumming is pretty good too, but it doesn’t shine here like it does in other songs.

Whether you like the band or not, “Panama” is one of those tunes that captures your attention every time it comes on the radio. Even if you’ve heard the opening riff a thousand times, you’re still intrigued to see where it’s going to take you. And by the time DLR yells, “JUMP BACK! What’s that sound?” you’re hooked. This song makes me want to line up a bunch of glass bottles on an old fence, pull out a .44 and start firing away. It makes me want to steal a Camaro and drive it through Fotomat (even though those things don’t exist any more). Basically the crap that Seth Rogan, Bill Hader and McLovin did in the movie “Superbad” is the stuff that I want to do when I hear this song.

And I wanted to do that stuff while I listened to this song BEFORE I saw the movie. That’s the mark of a great song.

If you’ve been reading the Good Songs entries of “19 Thoughts”, you know that I kinda like NWA. To me, Dr. Dre was the bassist of the group in that his beats and samples were the backbone of the group, yet he didn’t say too much. Every once in awhile, you’d hear him rap but I felt that the rest of the group was throwing him a bone like the way The Who or Led Zeppelin would let John Entwistle or John Paul Jones do something on an album that didn’t involve plucking bass strings*.

* When I was younger, my understanding of what these two guys did for their bands was feeble at best.

So when I heard that Dre was going to providing the lyrics for a song off the “Deep Cover” soundtrack, I was intrigued. Back then, depending on how you felt about MC Ren, Dre was probably the fourth most interesting member of the group. I had higher expectations for Ren’s new CD (“Kiss My Black Azz” – I love that title) because he rapped way more than Dre and had a better flow.

But then I heard this smoky, dark, foreboding song and I was shocked. This is Dr. Dre? Where the hell was he on “Efil4zaggin” when NWA needed help to offset the loss of Ice Cube? And who was this raspy-voiced, lithe dude? Snoop Doggy Dog? He’s named after Snoopy? I know that Charlie Brown was a dude from Leaders of the New School, but this was something way different.

Turns out that Dre wasn’t that bad of a rapper and Snoop Dog was even better. This was their first song and it was a harbinger of things to come. Dre and Snoop ruled over mid and late 90s hip hop and influenced not only a generation of MCs, but also a generation of DJs. Listening to this track now is like finding YouTube clips of Pedro Martinez striking out 82 batters in 77 innings for the Single-A Great Falls Dodgers.

Watching those clips now, you know Pedro was going to be great but you didn’t know how high his star would ascend. And that’s the same thing you get when you listen to the “Deep Cover” cut now. It’s a great tune but Dre and Snoop would eclipse it many times over in the coming years.

Some quickies:

Milky Cereal – LL Cool J has a well deserved reputation for being a ladies man and being the first “romantic” hip hop artist, but the guy could also be funny and turn a phrase. This was never more evident than in “Milky Cereal” where he talks about women, sexing women and fighting off their pissed-off parents as part of a balanced and nutritious breakfast. We all grew up watching cereal commercials on Saturday, and LL was just singing about the next thing.

Humpin – It took me awhile to find this song because it’s a forgettable jam by a forgettable band. But I guess that when I taped this mix, I really liked it. Listening to it now, it’s actually pretty graphic. I’m not offended but for a New Jack Swing type of group that the College Boyz (seem) to be, this was new ground. Like most NJS groups, it didn’t get them very far. Also the line, “College Boyz here to hump you!” might literally be the worst opening line ever.

Baby Got Back – I’m not made of stone. This Sir Mix A Lot tune was everywhere in 1992, why shouldn’t it be on a Good Songs mix? The other day I happened to be watching a Saturday Night Live marathon on VH1 Classic with a skit from the early 90s called “Delta, Delta, Delta” that starred Melanie Hutsell, Siobhan Fallon and Beth Cahill that made fun of sorority girls. Since I watched SNL religiously back in the day, I vaguely remember it but I don’t remember it being huge. I think Sir Mix A Lot is trying to glom on to the “popularity” of this sketch with the two girls at the beginning of this song. Or maybe he’s making fun of how white people talk. I have no idea. In any event, it’s pretty cool no matter what was going through his head.

And that’s why he was knighted by the Queen of England and you weren’t. 

Cold Blood – Ugh. Kix. What was I thinking?

Goods Songs X and XI

Good Songs X

The Power – Snap

Crumbs on the Table – D-Nice

Call Me D-Nice – D-Nice

Poison – Bell Biv DeVoe

Do Me! – Bell Biv DeVoe

The Gas Face – 3^rd Bass

It Takes 2 – Rob Base and DJ Easy Rock

Joy and Pain – Rob Base and DJ Easy Rock

U Can’t Touch This – MC Hammer

Express Yourself – NWA

The Humpty Dance – Digital Underground

I Left My Wallet in El Segundo – A Tribe Called Quest

Ride the Wind – Poison

Unskinny Bop – Poison

Deeper Shade of Soul – Urban Dance Squad

Love Song – Tesla

Scared – Dangerous Toys

Jackin’ For Beats – Ice Cube

We’re All in the Same Gang – West Coast Rap All-Stars

Good Songs XI

Smells Like Teen Spirit – Nirvana

Over the Hills and Far Away – Led Zeppelin

D’Yer Mak’er – Led Zeppelin

Heroin – Velvet Underground

Sorry for not posting this on Tuesday, but we got a bit of a storm up here in the Northeast. It dumped more than two feet of the white stuff at our house and that meant schools were closed for the day. When the kids are around, it’s difficult to write. Or think.

In fact it’s a lot like this edition of Good Songs, which is completely scattered. In the last entry, I told you that this was part of a troika of Good Songs tapes that I created to keep me occupied to Cooperstown, NY. The first was a rock tape, the second was rap and this one was where all the leftovers went. Two songs are still favorites of mine: “Deeper Shade of Soul” by Urban Dance Squad and A Tribe Called Quest’s “Left My Wallet in El Segundo”. I don’t think that the latter makes any appearances on future Good Songs tapes, but the former is the clubhouse leader for song found on most of these tapes. That means I’ll talk about the UDS a bit later.

I remember borrowing ATCQ’s “People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm” tape from a girl in my chemistry class. We both liked “El Sugundo” and “Bonita Applebaum” but for some dumb reason I never dubbed the whole tape, just “El Sugundo”. And that’s incredibly stupid because this is a really, really good tape. In fact, it’s one of the seminal hip-hop CDs from the era. Being “really into rap”, I should have realized this back then, but I think that we disproved that theory a few weeks ago. At the very least I should get partial street cred for realizing that Bonita and Segundo were both awesome songs, right?

This song is great for all the right reasons, Q-Tip’s flow, the beat, the subject matter, the subtle humor. It’s as good today as it was when it was released in 1991. I know ATCQ was popular, but I feel that they’re often overlooked too. They didn’t fall into the gangsta rap category, nor did they fall into the political rap category or the party rap group. They—along with the rest of the Zulu Nation—were about positivity and being intelligence. But it was all understated, they respected their audience enough not to keep smacking them over the head with their message.

As a whole, we like to think of ourselves as smart and not needing guideposts to lead us to answers. And that might be true, for some. But for the majority, they need their hand held. They need to be told over and over and over again that the guy in the black hat is “the wrong motherfucker to fuck with” or that this person in this movie is doing a very bad thing. While this person in this movie is doing a very good thing. The artist who exercises restraint and subtlety and allows the audience to figure things out often is misunderstood. And when something is misunderstood, it is often ignored.

I’m not saying that ATCQ was ignored – they sold millions of albums – but they deserve better.

A New York contemporary of ATCQ was 3^rd Bass. You might know them as the white rap guys after the Beastie Boys, but before Vanilla Ice. 3^rd Bass was an interesting group in that they tried hard not to offend black hip hop fans. They got into beefs with MCA (I think 3^rd Bass felt that they had to defend Def Jam when the Beasties left the label) and Vanilla Ice (mostly because he sucked). It seemed to me that Prime Minister Pete Nice and MC Serch (especially Serch) were bending over backwards to say, “This isn’t the 1950s, we aren’t going to steal your music.”

And that’s awesome. I don’t see anything wrong with that. At all. In fact, I think it’s pretty cool that they kept it real and paid homage to the pioneers that came before them. I just don’t think that there were any charges that white guys were becoming rappers and then coopting the music. I could be wrong though, I was 16 at the time and thought “Ride the Wind” was a good song.

In any event, “The Gas Face” is an awesome song. The beat is made up of Aretha Franklin’s “Think” and “Respect” and it’s just a catchy groove. Both of those samples were made to be rapped over – Prince Paul (who produced this album) did a masterful job with all the samples, but man, this one was especially great. When I bought the tape, I was really bummed that it didn’t include the video version (Flavor Flav makes an appearance and says something about the Gas Face) but that’s life in the big city. It does include Zev Love X’s (later known as MF Doom) verse. X has a much stronger presence on the mic than Serch or Pete Nice, as great as that verse is, I think that 3^rd Bass should have opted not to include it. They were served on their first single.

If I was really trying to be clever, I would have put MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” before or after this song. That would have been a nice touch.

The interesting thing about Pete Nice is that under his real name, Pete Nash, he’s one of the leading baseball memorabilia dealers in the country. He has a blog where he writes about the industry and he seems to know his stuff. The last I saw of MC Serch, he was hosting an American Idolesque show on VH1 about hip hop.

Some quick hits:

Poison and Do Me! – Bell Biv DeVoe and that whole new jack swing style of music was really coming along in the early 90s, wasn’t it? “Do Me!” is a ridiculous song. I was listening to it in my house, all alone and I was embarrassed. It was an obvious attempt to change their squeaky clean New Edition image by talking about s-e-x and maybe it worked, but it’s still really dumb. While “Do Me!” might be as fresh as a garbage fire, there’s nothing wrong with “Poison”. That song is still awesome. . There are two things I can’t forget about that song:

1. It was the last week of school and for some reason the halls were clogged with kids, I think that we were being herded somewhere. This dude Andy looks at me and says, “I don’t care what anyone says, I love that song ‘Poison’!” and just kept on walking. Andy and I weren’t what you’d call even remotely close and I never spoke to him a whole lot, so I’m not sure why he decided to share this information with me. But he did and it intrigued me enough into buying the BBD tape. So thank you, Andy. Where ever you are.

2. After college, I lived with a guy named Jamie. He was a great roommate and just a terrific person to be around. I know that he liked to screw around with our other roommate, so it’s no surprise that he liked to screw around with me too. We were watching a football game when former Syracuse wide receiver showed up on our screen (at the time he was playing for the Arizona Cardinals).

Jamie said, “BBD hates this guy. They talk about killing him on ‘Poison’.”
“They do not,” I said.
“They do. There’s a line that says, ‘Rob Moore you’re dead.’”
“No. It’s ‘One move, you’re dead’. Why would anyone want Rob Moore dead?”
“He screwed Biv’s girlfriend. They were telling him they know. And he’s dead.”

When it comes to popular culture, I am hopelessly naïve. My seventh-grade music teacher spent an entire semester (literally an entire semester) telling us that Paul McCartney was dead and that the person we think we know is Paul McCartney is Canadian Paul McCartney lookalike Billy Shears. And it took me years to listen to a Beatles album, I was so freaked out. So when Jamie explained this to me I believed him; hook, line and sinker.

And to be honest, I still kinda do believe it. Though I’m pretty sure that he was kidding. I wish I knew Rob Moore. Or Bell Biv DeVoe. I need to get to the bottom of this mystery.

“We’re All in the Same Gang” – You know what I like the most? Team-ups and cross overs. When I was into comics as a kid, if the X-Men guest starred in the Avengers, I was buying that comic. I love when TV characters leave their show and appear in another. So when I found out that all of the biggest West Coast rappers (except Ice Cube) teamed up to create this song, I thought it was the best thing ever. I know that the East Coast rappers did something similar a few months prior, but the WCRAS was so much better. But when you have people like Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice-T, Above the Law telling everyone not to kill people, respect the community, don’t do drugs; it comes across as a bit hypocritical.

I wrote about this in 2005 (2005! What the hell?) 

Finally, I think that Good Songs XI is a tape my brother made. I have zero recollection of this tape and it’s only four songs long. I don’t think that I made it, but I’m keeping it here for posterity.