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. 

Good Songs XVI

Over the Hills and Far Away – Led Zeppelin

D’Yer Mak’er – Led Zeppelin

Mistadobalina – Del the Funkee Homosapien

Crumbs on the Table – D-Nice

Call Me D-Nice – D-Nice

Steady Mobbin – Ice Cube

Misty Mountain Hop – Led Zeppelin

Mama Said Knock You Out – LL Cool J

The Jingling Baby – LL Cool J

Jet City Woman – Queensryche

Empire – Queensryche

Silent Lucidity – Queensryche

Bring the Noise – Public Enemy and Anthrax

When I was in high school, one of my best friends, Jamie, drove a  beat upHonda CR-X. At the time, he was the only one of my friends who could drive and we’d pack as many kids into this two-seat death trap as we could. If his girlfriend was along with us that day, the front seat was thus occupied, so it was in the back you went. Since there was no real back seat—it was essentially a hatch back—you considered yourself lucky if you could snag a piece of real estate near the back of the front seats. If you squatted there, there was only a slight chance of getting scoliosis. If you were stuck in the way back, you had a side dish of claustrophobia with your spine curvature.

I created this mix tape in the winter of 1993 but it has a real high school flavor to it. Specifically, the fall of 1990 which was a turning point in my life. My friend had his license, so I kinda had wheels. I was an upper classman, which was fun. Our soccer team finally won a game after literally 75 tries, that was a bonus. The weather seemed unusually warm that year, there seemed to be more parties and I was slightly less invisible to girls. It was a good time to be alive. One of the bigger life changes was being introduced to the music of Led Zeppelin for the first time*.

* Let me amend this statement, I had heard Led Zeppelin before 1990. But I only knew them as the group that sang the song [“Stairway to Heaven”] that closed out every junior high and high school dance. Also at the time, their boxset was constantly being advertised on MTV so I knew snippets of songs, but I was never really into them. 

Jamie’s car had a tape player, which at the time was the height of both wealth and technology and he played  “Over the Hills and Far Away” and “D’yer Mak’er” over and over and over and over again every day on our way to soccer practice. Every single day. I don’t know why, but I never really got sick of either of those songs, though I probably should have. The good thing about the way those two songs were situated on “Houses of the Holy” was that as soon as one song ended, you could flip the tape and hear the other. And Jamie’s stereo was so advanced that you didn’t even have to take the tape out to flip it, you just pressed a button. WHAT A WORLD!

To this day, OtHaFA is my favorite Led Zeppelin song and it’s probably because it reminds me of the fun that I had as a 16-year-old when the sun was always shining, the girls were pretty, the open road was new and my life was ahead of me. And I can guarantee that’s the reason why I lead this mix tape (which I made my freshman year in college) with that particular song.

Today “D’yer Mak’er” probably wouldn’t make my top 50 favorite Zep songs, but like Over the Hills, if I close my eyes and scrunch up into a ball (just for old times sake), I can still recall what it feels like to be 16 again.

There’s no two ways about it, “Mistadobalina” is a tremendous song. Written and rapped by Ice Cube’s cousin*, Del the Funkee Homosapien, it’s one of those tunes that nearly everyone who grew up in this era recalls, but doesn’t know much else about.

* If I was being clever, I would have put “Steady Mobbin’” after this cut. Or if I was being really clever, I would have included Ice Cube’s “Turn Off the Radio” which featured a snippet of Del “calling into” to a radio show to express his displeasure with commercial radio. Del was a member of Ice Cube’s band: Da Lench Mob – which had to change their name from the Lynch Mob because Dokken’s ex-guitarist, George Lynch, was touring with a band with the same name. Del to Dokken, so easy.

The interesting thing about the song’s hook, “Mr. Dobalina, Mr. Bob Dobalina” is from Peter Tork. You may remember him from as the goofy guitarist from the Monkees. One day, near the end of their run of thier TV series, the Monkees and Jack Nicholson (yes, that Jack Nicholson) decided to drop a crap load of acid, go out to the desert and write a movie that ended up being titled “Head”*. That script was completely bonkers (the first scene had the Monkees escaping the crush of their fans by committing suicide and jumping off a bridge) and didn’t do very well at box office. The first scene alienated their pre-teen fans who didn’t have access to the hard drugs needed to properly see the movie. This was the death knell for the Monkees.

* The Monkees were hoping that “Head” would be so successful that they’d be able to film a sequel. The tagline was already written too: “From the group that gave you ‘Head’!” I bet Mickey Dolenz came up with that, he seemed very bawdy. Or maybe Mike Nesmith wrote it, but not Davy Jones. Even though he’s English, that doesn’t seem to be cheeky enough to create this type of pun.

In one scene Peter Tork just aimlessly walks around reciting the Mr. Dobalina line. Apparently, Del thought that this was just weird enough to loop into a single. And it worked. At least it worked for me, looking at Wikipedia, “Mistadobalina” didn’t chart in the US, but it seemed to kick some serious ass in Scandinavia and central Europe—it was a top ten hit.

If things went different, Del the Funkee Homosapien may have been a hit with the Third Reich.

Queensyrche wasn’t your typical metal band. For one thing, they hailed from Seattle before that was a thing. And for another thing, it seems that most of their albums were concept albums. With the iTunes and downloading music, the flow of an album doesn’t matter much any more. Most folks only buy singles and the days of songs being placed on albums so one seamlessly leads to another is a lost art. That spelled the end of the concept album*, which always seemed to me as a way for a band to show their fans and critics (mostly critics) that they were “smart” and “serious”.

* Kanye West is the only artist today that I could envision creating a concept album. And that’s because he’s nuts and he wants people to think that he’s a smart and talented dude with something to say.

The concept album usually ended up in a mangled mess. Themes that were introduced at the beginning of the album were forgotten by the fifth track. Story lines and plot were nebulous at best. And by the last track, the entire band seemed frustrated, bored and wanted to get it over with as soon as possible. It seemed to me that a concept album is like putting together a 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle only you have a dozen people trying to tell you where each piece goes.

If you want to experience a terrible concept album created by a band who desperately wanted people to take them seriously, listen to KISS’ “Music from the Elder”. It’s awful and stupid. And to make matters worse, the title is confusing because it insinuates that the Elder was also a movie. In a textbook example of putting the cart before the horse, KISS (as only KISS could do) thought that this album was going to be so big, and people were going to be so blown away by their songwriting abilities, they titled the album because they thought that a film was inevitable. It was not. And their hubris almost completely destroyed the band.

Interestingly enough, Queensryche seemed to have the discipline to decently do a concept album. “Operation: Mindcrime” and “Empire” both were pretty good. And they were able to pull off the trick of releasing good sounding singles that were also integral to the story of the album. The funny thing is that though they were able to do concept albums well, they never reached the popularity or career longevity of KISS.

I guess that begs the question: would you rather be smart and good at your job but severely lacking in the popularity (and money) department or would you rather be dumb and shitty but popular and rich? I guess only Geoff Tate and the rest of Queensyrche knows for sure*.

* I just looked something up on Wikipedia and former Queensryche guitarist Mike Stone was also a member of a band called Criss. That band was helmed by former KISS drummer Peter Criss. 19 Thoughts is all about coming full circle, kids!

I was never a big Queensryche guy. I understood that they were a notch above the musical evolutionary scale of say Motely Crue or Poison, but their fans always seemed a bit too intense for me. They had long hair, were in a band, also were obsessed with the band Dream Theater and spent a lot of time arguing about what each song meant and how it fit into that particular album and Queensryche’s oeuvre as a whole. And yes, they would use the word “oeuvre”. A lot.

They may not have been book smart, but man, they knew their music inside and out. In short, they were a bit intimidating.

Speaking of popularity and the crossroads bands sometime find themselves at, when Public Enemy and Anthrax released “Bring the Noise”, I thought that PE was going to explode. MTV played the hell out of that video in the late summer of 1991. This song along with the PE shirt that Edward Furlong (young John Connor) wore through out the entirety of “Terminator 2” signaled to me that Public Enemy was going to be one of the biggest bands of the 90s.

For a variety of reasons, it didn’t happen. Public Enemy was certainly extremely popular and has legions of fans, but I thought that they’d be everywhere, which would instantly validate my fandom of the band*. What I didn’t understand was that Public Enemy was never going to be that type of band. And I don’t think that they ever wanted to be, mainly because you’d have to change your stance on a lot of politics (soften it up) to appeal to the masses.

* For some reason, I was obsessed with my choices being validated and proven “right”. Whether it was music, TV, movies or sports whatever I was in to, I wanted it to be the most popular, most coolest thing around. It didn’t occur to me, until much later, that when niche things start getting really popular, they lose a lot of their shine. Once I learned that being happy with something and not caring about what anyone else thinks is the right way to consume media. Haters gonna hate.

Chuck D and Public Enemy weren’t going to do that, so they just kept soldiering on. Still famous, but also under the radar.

This song also made me think that the rap/rock crossover was going to start a new music revolution where it didn’t matter if you played hip hop or rock, music was music. That didn’t really happen either, it did for awhile I guess, but then Limp Bizkit showed up and brought with them a bunch of really, really crappy groups. That sent rock into a deep tailspin and splintering music into a million different genres.

Be careful what you wish for, I guess.

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.