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 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.