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 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.

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.