The Wax Pack: a Review

Up until my sixth grade summer there were a few things that were incredibly important to me: comic books, candy and soda. Maybe my computer too. But I had to rely on my parents to a. get me that computer and b. get me games and software to make it do cool stuff. The other three things were stuff that if I had a few bucks and my bike, I could go to the corner store and get without them. 

The summer of 1986 was a transformative few months for me. The Red Sox were really good that year and one star in particular captured the region's imagination like no athlete since a young Larry Bird. His name was Roger Clemens and beginning on that cold April night when he set a Major League record by striking out 20 Seattle Mariners, he was my guy. Even though I've lived in Massachusetts my entire life, on that night, the Red Sox really became my team. Up until then I liked baseball, but that was the summer that I fell head-over-heals in love with baseball. 

The cool thing about baseball--and sports in general--was that even in the mid 80s, you could find more and more information about the game everywhere. The newespapers had daily coverage of the Sox. Magazines had weekly coverage. Local sports anchors were LIVE! from Fenway Park practically every night the Sox were home previewing the game at 6:00 and recapping it at 11:00. Every game was on TV or the radio--there were even stations devoted specifically to sports! Not only that but the library had shelves and shelves of books devoted specifically to the sport. 

 

There was a lot of ways to get immersed in the sport, that summer I practically drowned in baseball. And I did it happily.  

But for a kid with a dollar or two in his pocket, baseball cards were the best way to find out about today's players and ultimately the game. The first baseball cards that I ever bought was a pack from Cumberland Farms, a convenience store only a short ride from my house in Amesbury, MA. Topps was my brand. I remember the electric blue wrapper, the way that word "BASEBALL" was in bright red and the yellow sunburst advertising a contest where the winner gets a free trip to Florida to check out next year's spring training*. 

Even before you got to the cards, you had the hard, pink gum. It tasted awful and it cut up the insides of your mouth, but what kid is going to throw away free gum? After you popped that stick in your mouth, it was time to rifle through the cards and see if you got one of your favorites. Most of the time you didn't--how many Roger Clemens did Topps make anyway--but even the commons (the non-star) players had their own dignity. It was though the commons that you learned about the game. 

* Did anyone ever find out whether someone won that trip? Topps never seemed to publicize it. That seems like something that they'd want to do. Alas. 

The above paragraphs were a very long walk to what I wanted to write about today. Writer Brad Balukjian and I are around the same age and it appears that his first card set was the same as mine too. He wrote a terrific book called "The Wax Pack" which revolves around him buying a pack of 1986 cards recently, going through the cards and then jumping in the car and tracking down the random assortment of players whose cardboard likenesses he had found. 

 

This book was made for people like me. 

From Randy Ready to Jamie Cocanower to Gary Templeton to Don Carmen to Rance Mulliniks and more, Balukjian tracked them down and was able to spend time and talk to the men that were once just names and statistics. Most of the players that he contacted were glad to be remembered. Cocanower* was particularly psyched to talk and invited Balukjian to his home to celebrate the Fourth of July with him and his family. 

* Despite playing less than a handful of years in the Bigs and with a team that was largely anonymous to me (the Milwaukee Brewers) and not having great number, when I was a kid, Jaime Cocanower left a big impression on me and my friends. It was the name. It just seemed so exotic and strange. Did he own cocaine or cocoa? Was his named pronounced JAY-me or HY-may? But we really just loved saying his name, it was so musical. Anyway this book answered a lot of the questions that I carried around with me about Jaime Cocanower. 

The pack isn't just filled with nice guys like the ones named above, but some legit stars like Carlton Fisk and Dwight Gooden didn't comply with repeated requests from Balukjian. And while they're mostly complete assholes, they all have their reasons. These are the chapters that I found fascinating because of how dogged, without being a jerk, Balukjian is about tracking these players down and how incredibly interesting how he writes about the misses. As a former reporter, I could completely sympathize with Balukjian when he wonders why someone like Vince Coleman or Gary Pettis won't return a phone call.

This book is mostly a memoir and Balukjian does a great job of weaving his backstory in with the stories of the ballplayers. There are a couple of clunkers here there--the story about approaching Fisk in Cooperstown is a bit cringe-y and I don't think that the reason why he and his girlfriend broke up is quite as significant as he teases it over the first few chapters--but at 260 plus pages, not every anecdote is going to be a home run. 
 

I know that the cliche says, "You can't judge a book by it's cover" but I did. I had a stack of books that I was going to read before this one, but this book's cover that looked exactly like the 1986 Topps wax pack wrapper and it jumped out at me. The cover filled me with a nostalgic warmth that I haven't felt in such a long time. I couldn't wait to read what this book was about and be transported back to being 11-years-old when discovering who was in a wax pack was my primary concern. As soon as I finished the book that I was currently reading, I immediately started reading this one. 

And I'm glad that I did, because The Wax Pack is an awesome read and it brought me back to 1986 when the men who played Major League Baseball were gods in polyester. In 2020, that's a special gift.

I was sent The Wax Pack free to review and comment on. This did not have any effect on my review. 

Good Songs IX

Murder Rap – Above the Law

We Want Eazy – Eazy-E

Radio – Eazy-E

Around the Way Girl – LL Cool J

Mama Said Knock You Out – LL Cool J

Straight Outta Compton – NWA

Fuck tha Police – NWA

8-Ball – NWA

100 Miles and Runnin’ – NWA

Sa Prize (Part 2) – NWA

Bring the Noise – Public Enemy

Don’t Believe the Hype – Public Enemy

Louder Than A Bomb – Public Enemy

Caught Can We Get A Witness – Public Enemy

Night of the Living Baseheads – Public Enemy

Brothers Gonna Work It Out – Public Enemy

Welcome to the Terrordome – Public Enemy

Fight the Power – Public Enemy

Burn Hollywood, Burn – Public Enemy

When I tell people, “I really used to be into rap and hip hop when I was younger”, that’s not entirely true. What I should say is, “I was really into Public Enemy and NWA when I was younger” because looking at these track lists, that’s the only hip-hop I was really into.

Up until now, I thought that I was REALLY into hip-hop. I considered my late teens as my hip-hop phase. I thought that I was the hip-hop vanguard of Amesbury High School. But I wasn’t. At all. And this realization is like finding out that your mom was Santa Claus because she liked wearing men’s clothes. The image I had of myself as a youth has been shattered.

Shattered illusions aside, when I was listening to this playlist this morning, I closed my eyes for a couple of minutes to remember where in my life I was when I created this mix. And it came to me, I created this mix (as well as the one that I wrote about yesterday and the one that I will write about next Tuesday) because my baseball team was going to Cooperstown to play a game in the Spring of 1991.

What I remember most from that trip was that my team, the junior varsity Amesbury High Fighting Indians, had a perfect game thrown against us by a team from Heightstown, NJ. I don’t know why we played them, but they kicked our butts pretty good. Other than that humiliation, the trip was excellent. It was my first experience on an out-of-state school trip since the unexplained eighth grade Spanish class sojourn to Montreal. Four of my best friends and I were crammed into a tiny, run-down, no-tell motel called the Glimmer Glass Inn, which has been the basis of many jokes since we stayed there. Aside from the shabby rooms, we did everything 30 teenage boys without girls would do: someone snuck a bottle of booze into the motel, we ate like assholes, we ran amuck, we pulled pranks, we didn’t sleep.  

My dad was one of the drivers to the New York hamlet, but I don’t recall seeing him too much. He hung around with the other fathers and gave me my space to act like a fool with the rest of my buddies. In retrospect, that was a pretty cool move on his part.

The Cooperstown trip was a part of a hectic three weekends in a row for me where I made my Confirmation (no big deal, but I got a lot of cash), Cooperstown (where I spent a majority of that cash) and then the Junior Prom (which was an incredibly awful experience and where I spent the rest of that cash). The prom was a perfect encapsulation of my life at that particular time: awkward, mismanaged and disappointing. I asked a girl who I barely know, she agreed, weeks later I discovered this was a mistake (as did she) and we spent the better part of the evening avoiding each other. I did get hammered on a bottle of Super Schnapps, so I had that going for me.

Returning to my original premise of this blog, when I look at this list of songs, I again find that I’m just basically rerecording “Straight Outta Compton” and two Public Enemy tapes. There’s nothing really interesting about this mix. The only songs on this tape that don’t share the same DNA with NWA or Public Enemy are the LL Cool J tracks.

“Around the Way Girl” was the typical song that made Ladies Love Cool James. There’s the typical machismo fronting mixed with the sweet, “baby I’m gonna treat you right” flavor that LL was so fond of dishing – and that women ate up with a spoon.

I haven’t listened to this song in years (aside from the two pair of bamboo earrings, it’s held up well) but when I heard it today there is something in the background that’s hard for me to ever unhear. While LL raps there is a synth sample that stays constant through out his just lyrics. It’s hard to describe, but it sounds like it’s the beginning of run that just stops on one note. And that note is held for a minute, maybe two minutes under the bass. Once the hook kicks in, it stops. Then it starts again. This pattern is repeated through the entirety of the song.

It’s a strange sound texture because once I picked up on, I stopped listening to what LL was saying and I was just waiting for this synth run to pick up or finally end. It became quite, unnerving is the wrong word, but I became anxious for it to stop. I don’t think that LL or his producers had that in mind when they chose the beats for this song, but it was an interesting side effect.

Three quick things before I get into the meat of this extremely long post:

I have Eazy-E’s “Radio” slotted before getting to the LL Cool J stuff. I’m sure that I did that on purpose. I’m quite the Easter egg comedian.

Above the Law is a pale imitation of NWA, but “Murder Rap” is a legitimately good song. It sounds like a combination of Public Enemy (the layer of beats, especially the horn) and NWA (the lyrics).

I have no idea why I didn’t match the two-for-Tuesday format that the rock Good Songs mix follows. I think it would have made for a stronger tape.

I’ve written enough about NWA to fill three books, so I’m not about to write more about the group here other than “Fuck tha Police” gets all the attention (and rightly so), but for my money, “Straight Outta Compton” is a better overall song. The imagery that Ice Cube uses, the beats that Dre and Yella chose, the way the entire group conveys the message, the first time I heard it, I didn’t have goosebumps, my stomach doubled over. It was that type of feeling you get when something important or cool is about to happen.

After 25 years, this song is still on my iPhone and if I haven’t heard it in awhile and it comes on during shuffle, I still get a hint of that excitement. And that brings me back to riding home in my friend’s Honda from the Fox Run Mall in Newington, NH, frantically ripping off the plastic shrink-wrap from the cassette and jamming it into the car’s tape deck, not knowing what we’d hear. It didn’t disappoint.

Speaking of remembering where you were the first time you heard a band, there’s a lot of Public Enemy on this tape. And that’s because Public Enemy was one of the first groups that shaped my world perception. The first time I was aware of Chuck D and Flavor Flav is when they showed up on Living Colour’s track “Funny Vibe”. I had no idea who they were and after reading the linear notes I figured out their names at least.

It was April vacation of 1990* when I first spotted a Public Enemy tape, specifically “It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” at a Genovese drug store near my cousin’s apartment in Mt. Vernon, NY. I remember thinking that if Chuck D was good enough for Living Colour, he’s probably good enough for me so I bought that and 3^rd Bass’ “Cactus Cassette” to listen to on the long ride back to Massachusetts.

* The only other thing that I remember about this visit was that I woke up early on Saturday April 21 and was shocked that Seattle Mariner pitcher Brian Holman came within one out of throwing a perfect game against the mighty Oakland Athletics – in Oakland! As much as I’ve always loved the Red Sox, during this time in my life, I loved this A’s team. It seemed that every position was stacked, so for Holman to almost throw a perfect game, that was insane. Holman was part of the trade that sent Mark Langston from the M’s to the Expos the year prior. Also included in that trade was Randy Johnson, he wasn’t a bad pitcher at all. And the guy who ended it was a cult hero and former Mariner, Ken Phelps who crushed a first-pitch fastball into the bleachers. At the time Phelps was famous among statheads as the best baseball player who despite his OBP and HR per AB never got a chance to play regularly. He became more famous a few years later when George Steinbrenner (as played by Larry David) defended the Jay Buhner for Phelps swap that Frank Costanza complains about. “Ken Phelps! Ken Phelps! Ken Phelps! That’s all my scouts kept saying,” said Steinbrenner. In any event, I think that I watched those highlights all morning.

I popped Public Enemy’s tape into my second Sony water resistant (and kids, there’s a difference between water proof and water resistant, which is why I was on number two) yellow Walkman somewhere in Connecticut. I forgot about 3^rd Bass and listened to PE over and over and over again, studying the lyrics and notes that came with the tape.

I would love to say that I had some sort of political awaking with this tape, but I had no idea who three-quarters of the people Chuck D was talking about (Garvey? There was a kid named Derek Garvey in my school, but Chuck couldn’t be talking about him, he was the worst. BTW, Chuck D was talking about Marcus Garvey) and there was no internet so the names stuck in my head as questions without answers. No, it was the way Chuck delivered his lines with such purpose, such strength that got me. And add the Bomb Squad’s deft weaving of a loud sonic tapestry and this was like ear crack. I literally couldn’t get enough. I had read somewhere that the follow-up to ITANOMTHUB was recently released (according to Wikipedia, it was April 10, 1990) and within a week of that vacation to New York*, I had purchased that tape too.

* Don’t think for a minute that I didn’t play up that I bought the PE tape in Mt. Vernon, NY to my friends. My cousin lived in a nice enough area, but I made it sound as if I was dodging bullets to buy these tunes. I had an overactive imagination.

For the remainder of that summer, for the remainder of that year, for the remainder of my high school career; I listened to one of these two tapes at least once a day. “Fear of a Black Planet” is the only tape I ever broke from listening to it too much. And I know these songs front and back. I knew the words, I knew the beats, the layers upon layers of different sounds*.  When I was in my room listening to Public Enemy, I didn’t feel like a detached outsider, I felt like I was part of something. I’m not sure what, but it felt different than when I listened to Ice Cube or NWA or Dokken or Motely Crue.

* Well, maybe I didn’t know ALL the sounds. The one thing that I remember most about “Welcome to the Terrordome”, and it’s not the the line “Tell the Rab to get off the rag” which got Chuck D in a lot of trouble, is that at 1:47 into the track there is a high-pitched squeal. The first dozen times I listened to it, I thought that it was my brother calling, “Byron!” So I’d press pause on the tape, scream out “WHAT?” and wait for an answer. After listening to the song over a bunch of times I asked him why does he always call me in the middle of WTTT and he had no idea what I was talking about. I don’t know who this story reflects poorly on: my inability to recognize a sound on a tape from my brother’s voice or just how high and pitchy Jay’s voice was when he was 12-years-old.

From then on, everything in my life revolved around Public Enemy.

I drew the B-Boy in a gun scope logo over all of my book covers (so much so that my parents suspected that I was the Zodiac killer). I painstakingly drew the cover to “Fear of a Black Planet” on the duffle bag that I carried my books in. Every picture of Chuck D., Flavor Flav, Professor Griff, Terminator X or S1Ws (which were pretty dumb, to be honest) were cut from my school library’s copy of Rolling Stone and taped to the inside of my locker.

I bought a black Oakland A’s Starter-esque jacket because I thought Chuck D might wear this. I bought a pinstriped Chicago Bulls Starter jersey because Flavor Flav DID wear it. I was beyond pissed that my mom wouldn’t let me go to a Gang of Four, Sisters of Mercy, Public Enemy show with some college kids that I worked with. I ate, breathed and slept this group – it’s of no wonder that a vast majority of their songs were on my Good Songs mix tape.

A few years ago, I finally saw Public Enemy in concert and it was great, for a hip hop show. The problem with hip hop shows is that when you see your favorite rapper in concert the stage is just too big. Even with dancers (or in PE’s case the S1W’s) and TV screens and other crap littering the stage, it really boils down to the DJ, the MC(s) and that’s it. There’s not much going on. Despite the intrinsic problems, Public Enemy did a good job live. Sixteen-year-old me would have been happy.

But the thing that 16-year-old me would have lost his mind over was that once I had an honest-to-god interaction with Chuck D over Twitter. I follow him (old habits die hard) and one night I asked him a question. On “Louder Than A Bomb” Flavor says, “The Fed-derals are trying to pull a 226 on you, G.” what is a 226. Chuck explained it and then started following me on Twitter—I’m sure he’s learning so much. I think that I gushed about seeing them in Boston but I went to sleep next to my wife, in the same house that my kids were sleeping in, thinking that was pretty much one of the coolest things that ever happened to me.

You can turn 30. You can turn 40. You can even turn 100, but the heroes that you had when you are 16-years-old will always matter. I wonder what Brian Holman is up to?

Good Songs VI and VII

Good Songs VI

Fight the Power  - Public Enemy

Sa Prize (Part 2) – NWA

We Want Eazy – Eazy E

Doowutchyalike – Digital Underground

Contract on the World Love Jam/Brothers Gonna Work It Out – Public Enemy

Fuck tha Police – NWA

Welcome to the Terrordome – Public Enemy

Dopeman – NWA

Loves Gonna Getcha – Boogie Down Productions

Better Off Dead/Nigga Ya Love Ta Hate – Ice Cube

U Can’t Touch This – MC Hammer

Straight Outta Compton – NWA

100 Miles and Runnin’ – NWA

Poison – Bell Biv DeVoe

Bring The Noise – Public Enemy

Don’t Believe the Hype – Public Enemy

Good Songs VII

Express Yourself (remix) – NWA

Straight Outta Compton (remix) – NWA

A Bitch Iz a Bitch – NWA

Straight Outta Compton – NWA

Fuck tha Police – NWA

Gangsta Gangsta – NWA

8-Ball – NWA

Express Yourself – NWA

Dopeman – NWA

Bring the Noise – Public Enemy

Don’t Believe the Hype – Public Enemy

Louder Than A Bomb – Public Enemy

Caught Can We Get A Witness – Public Enemy

She Watch Channel Zero – Public Enemy

Night of the Living Baseheads – Public Enemy

Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos – Public Enemy

Party For Your Right to Fight – Public Enemy

The Gas Face – 3^rd Bass

* I am not going to discuss Good Songs VII. I just added it here for posterity. All this mix tape is my favorite songs from NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton” and Public Enemy’s “It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” with 3^rd Bass’ “The Gas Face” added to finish out the side. Since I listened to both of those albums twice a day, every day for two years, I must have gotten sick of fast-forwarding over filler songs and created this tape. It’s really not worth writing about.

I’m not sure when, exactly, I taped Good Songs VI, but I can bet that I thought that I was quite a badass. Just look at the track list, its all-rap, all-day. That’s the mean streets, baby. The ‘hood. My home. The place that I’m from.

Only I’m not and I wasn’t. Amesbury, Massachusetts is about as far from “the mean streets” as just about any place in America. It’s a quintessential middle-class Norman Rockwell town where less than 5% of its population is could be classified as a minority. There are no violent crimes, there are no home invasions, burglaries, civil unrest, murder or hard drugs. It was a quiet, sleepy town that had some advantages when it came to raising children (diversity was not one of them, BTW).

And it used to make me mad.

When you’re 16-years-old, being angry and dissatisfied with life is the standard setting. From school to sports to parents to other authority figures, on the whole, everything sucks. People are trying to keep you down, trying to infringe on your fun, won’t give you money, won’t take you seriously. But when you’re white and middle class, it’s pretty dumb outlook on life*.

No one every said that teenagers were smart—and this includes the smart ones.

* For some reason I thought that I had some sort of “street cred” because I was born in one of the worst, most depressed cities in Massachusetts: Lawrence. My grandmother lived in elderly housing there while I was in high school I’d casually mention to my friends that I was “going to the ‘hood to see my Nina.” With the assumption that they thought I was tough.

Though when push came to shove (literally), I was gigantic wuss. On January 1, 1991 my friend Ryan and I woke up at his house in Charlestown, MA and decided to go and grab a slice of pizza from a very safe Italian neighborhood in Boston called the North End. We each had on our high school letterman’s jackets (mine Amesbury, his from Central Catholic in Lawrence) and we stopped for a second to check out a street hockey game. We continued our walk and didn’t notice that the game broke up and moved from the playground to the street. It wasn’t until a few moments later that we realized the game broke up and now the nine kids hockey-stick wielding kids made a semi-circle around Ryan and I pushing us against a brick wall and asking us why we were watching their game, what were we doing on their turf, etc.

Yada, yada, yada, we get our assses beat. Hard. I never threw a punch and neither did Ryan, who unfortunately got a worse beating than me. His head was sliced open by a vicious hockey stick slash and was rushed to Massachusetts General Hospital. The only good thing that came out of that ass-kicking was I had an interesting story to tell at school the next day. Looking back, it probably wasn’t worth it.  Maybe it was.

My friends and I were always pissed off about something, not Dylan Klebold –Eric Harris-Columbine pissed off, but that typical teenage angst anger that dissipates after a few years. When we weren’t raging against our “oppressors” (pretty much anyone who didn’t give us carte blanche to act like morons) we were angry that we lived in such a safe vanilla world.

Late 80s, early 90s hip-hop allowed us to escape from the land of banality by picturing ourselves behind the trigger: talking crap, beating fools, not being afraid of girls (yes, no matter how much we fronted, we were all scared of girls), ultimately being in complete control of our lives and perceptions. We wore the black hats because we were bad. The music was empowerment and with artists like Public Enemy, Boogie Down Productions and NWA (especially the seminal album “Straight Outta Compton”) it wasn’t just cursing to be clever, there was a message behind it.

I’m not sure if we actually understood exactly what Chuck D, KRS-One and Ice Cube were really saying (not likely), but we coopted their fears, their frustrations, their aggressions and made them our own. When Ice Cube yelled, “Fuck the Police” because of police brutality; my friends and I were hollering “Fuck the Police” because they broke up a party and took our beer. It’s basically the same thing, right?

Looking through the song list, one thing is abundantly clear; I loved myself some NWA and Public Enemy. Of the 16 songs on that mix, only three have no connection to those two groups—“Doowutchyalike” is an underappreciated gem from this era. When I listened to the tracks today, I think that the Public Enemy songs (mostly) hold up well. The older NWA tracks aren’t too bad either, but the newer tracks are comically bad.

We could all list countless examples of a sequel never living up to the heights of its predecessor. From books to music to movies to TV, the sequel is usually a dumber, lazier carbon copy of the original. This is especially true for NWA’s “Sa Prize! (Part 2)”, which is the follow-up to “Fuck tha Police”. Found on NWA’s “100 Miles and Runnin’” EP, “Sa Prize” has the bombast of the original but none of the social commentary, none of the emotion, none of the heart. It’s a paint-by-numbers recreation of the original.

This is probably due to the departure of NWA’s chief lyricist, Ice Cube*. He quit (or was fired depending on who you believe) sometime after “Straight Outta Compton” was released. During that time, the album was a hit and the record label was demanding a follow-up. NWA responded with this album, and it wasn’t very good.

* When I was a kid, I whole-heartedly believe in something I created called the Compton Conspiracy Theory. My thinking was, NWA was a huge group and was selling millions of albums collectively as a group. What if that group splintered and instead of selling just one million records (to pick a number), each member recorded an album and that a million records? Instead of one million-selling record, you could have up to five million-selling records—assuming that the world was ready for a Yella Boy solo project.

Kiss tried the same thing in the late 70s but what that got wrong was that there was nothing to manipulate a person into buying all four albums. If Ace Frehley wrote a diss track about Gene Simmons, you’d have to buy both to see what Simmons would say back to him. That’s what NWA and Ice Cube were doing a the time.   

It seemed like a genius plan, NWA and Ice Cube get into a beef, they diss each other on their records, people buy the records to hear the diss tracks and both groups profit. Back in the 90s there was no internet, MTV wasn’t going to tell you exactly what the two factions were saying about each other and for the most part, the mainstream media ignored hip hop.  The only way one could follow this feud was through album purchases. Instead of buying one NWA tapes, you have to buy two.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that my conspiracy idea had any legs to stand on. Ice Cube’s anger at NWA is as old as the music business itself, he felt like (and he probably was) getting shafted on money by his manager. He told him so, he quit the group and ultimately made more money. Within three years the other members of NWA also felt they were getting screwed over, so they left and Dr. Dre became a household name and MC Ren released, “Kizz Mah Black Azz”.

“Sa Prize” was a complete mess with crooked cop skits, the DOC not knowing whether to bully cops or be afraid of them and Eazy-E doing a terrible, terrible Spanish accent (“Good thing you don’t speak Ingles, Holmes!”). At the time, I didn’t care, I guarantee I thought that it was awesome and that it spoke to me and my particular lot in life.

Between “Sa Prize” and Ice Cube’s debut, “AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted”, it was completely obvious who the lyrical brains were in NWA. After he was expelled from the group, Oshea Jackson was exiled to the East Coast where he hooked up with Public Enemy’s producers, the Bomb Squad. There he seemed to mature a bit from angry front man to angry front man with a message. The bombast was still there, but it was undercut with humility.

On the track “Better Off Dead”, which is the very first on “AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted”, Ice Cube is electrocuted. For what, the listener never finds out. But from that track it kicks into “The Nigga Ya Love to Hate” that includes the chorus, “Fuck you, Ice Cube”. It was this dichotomy of arrogance and self-abnegation that really spoke to me and mirrored what it meant to be 16-years-old.

When you’re a teenage boy, you never show a sliver of weakness. Ever. You’re always hard or at the very least you want to give off the perception that you’re tough (and this is why teenage boys are the WORST). But on the inside you’re a mess. You’re hormones are working over time, you like girls but you can’t think of anything to say, your body is changing and you can’t keep up, you think of clever quips to make but they never make it out of your mouth. You’re an alien in your own body and you can never betray this secret to anyone.

One day you figure it out and the next thing you know you’re yelling at a Coors Light can in a beer commercial or you’re taking a bunch of kids on a vacation in an RV.

Fuck you, Ice Cube? No. Fuck me.