Good Songs XV

Enter Sandman – Metallica

Pass the Mic – Beastie Boys

So Whatcha Want – Beastie Boys

Jump Around – House of Pain

Milky Cereal – LL Cool J

Scenario – A Tribe Called Quest

Humpin’ – College Boyz

Panama – Van Halen

Deep Cover – Dr. Dre featuring Snoop Doggy Dog

Always Inta Something – NWA

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

Baby Got Back – Sir Mix A Lot

Back in Black – AC/DC

Cold Blood – Kix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some quickies:

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

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

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

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

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

Good Songs VIII

Kiss of Death – Dokken

Burning Like a Flame – Dokken

Epic – Faith No More

Falling to Pieces – Faith No More

Up All Night – Slaughter

Fly to the Angels – Slaughter

Never Enough – LA Guns

Ballad of Jayne – LA Guns

Cult of Personality – Living Colour

Glamour Boys – Living Colour

Type – Living Colour

Love Rears Its Ugly Head – Living Colour

Don’t Close Your Eyes – Kix

Cold Blood – Kix

Kickstart My Heart – Motley Crue

Doctor Feelgood – Motley Crue

Don’t Go Away Mad – Motley Crue

Same Old Situation – Motley Crue

Down Boys – Warrant

Currently, I am a marketer. Technically, I’m a product marketer and that can mean a lot of different things at a lot of different companies. However, the bulk of my job is understanding my product, crafting a message for that product and making sure that message gets to the buying public. Unless you have amazing brand recognition (Apple, Coca-Cola, McDonalds) getting that message out there can be difficult.

But that’s what I love about my job. I love determining what the product’s message and value props are going to be and figuring out a way to present it in a way that will make people reach into their wallets and pay my company their hard-earned money. That’s probably a crass way to put it, but that’s basically what my job boils down to.

One of the things that I would love to discover (and this is a discovery, more than an invention, thought I assume it could be argued either way) is an algorithm that will correctly predict the whims of the public. On a macro-level, I’m not sure if you need something like this. Normally, people will gravitate to something that has a ton of hype around it. Hype costs money, ergo if you have a ton of money you can get your hype and your customers. The trick is creating something worthwhile enough so that the hype can die down a bit and people will still actively seek out your product. The bottom line is, money helps.  

The algorithm that I would like to discover would operate  on the micro-level. Why do some towns and cities prefer Pepsi over Coke, Budweiser over Coors Light, Burger King over McDonalds. These hamlets have their regional favorites and there has to be a reason why. If you get enough of these micro-levels together, you get a chunk of the macro-level and start competing with the big guys.

The first two songs on this tape* sorta relate to this micro-level way of thinking.

* The next three Good Songs tapes were all created at the same time. They were broken up into Rock, Rap and Mix. As you might be able to tell from this tape, the first 14 songs are paired – a duo of songs from one tape. Except for some reason I really liked me some Motley Crue at this point, so I doubled the duo of Dr. Feelgood. Anyway, I’m not sure if I like this gimmick, it reminds me of those old “Two for Tuesdays” programs they’d run on the local radio station where you’d get two songs from the same artist. I have a feeling that I was influenced by MTV who was playing video blocks of the same type of music during the summer of 1990 and 91. At this point in my life, MTV was the Pied Piper, I’d pretty much buy anything that was in heavy rotation on MTV.

This micro-level of marketing refers to the band Dokken and my specifically high school. From any objectionable point-of-view there is no difference between Dokken and Ratt and LA Guns and Poison or any other mid-80s, LA heavy metal band. Like those bands, they were an amalgam of Led Zeppelin/Van Halen/Black Sabbath-influenced rock that placed a premium on looking a certain way (PRETTY!) and acting a certain way (obtuse and obnoxious). Also like those bands, Dokken didn’t do anything extraordinary. The lyrics weren’t anything special, the musicianship was mediocre and even the way that the singles were released (rockin’ one first, ballad second, whatever third) was all the same.

They were unoriginal soliders in a time where corporations were pumping out bands who were rockin’ by numbers. They were a disposable band that was an example of a successful musical formula.

For some reason, Dokken took ahold of my high school. Or at least the band took ahold of the cooler guys in my grade, which meant that the band Dokken had a heightened sense of awareness at Amesbury High School. It wasn’t “Dokken or Die” but I seem to remember that there were a lot of cafeteria conversations about whether Dokken guitarist was “Awesome”, “Fucking Awesome” or “Wicked Fucking Awesome”. On days when “Mr. Scary” was extra loud, there were some debates about whether Lynch was legitimately better than Jimi Hendrix or Jimmy Page.

I’m sure that every moderately popular band had an unexplained loyal following at every high school in America, so I don’t mean to single my high school out. I’m sure you could replace Lynch with Rikki Rocket or Richie Sambora or Mick Mars and the same conversations where taking place all throughout America at that time.

As a young person you have no real idea of what came before you but you have an endless amount of time to figure out where you heroes will rank. I thought that Jose Canseco would sail into the Hall of Fame on his first ballot, things happen. But what I’m most interested in is how did one high school in the middle of nowhere, Massachusetts have a slavish devotion to a completely forgettable and totally middle-of-the-road rock band? I’ve thought about this question for nigh 20 years and I don’t think that I ever figured out a good answer. Maybe an algorithm for predicting the trends of teenagers is dumb because there is too much randomness, but I don’t believe that. There should be an answer somewhere.

It’s been a long time since I’ve listened to Dokken* (actually, I do unironically enjoy the second song on this tape, “Burning Like a Flame”) but it’s interesting how hearing the opening riffs to “Kiss of Death” brings back those old high school memories. I never made a big deal of liking or disliking Dokken (in fact, I know I got “Back For the Attack” from the Columbia House tape club for a penny) but I’m not made of stone. I heard a bunch of people talking about a band, I listened to them a few dozen times, I thought that maybe I could get cool by osmosis, it didn’t work that way and I moved on. High school is a strange time.

* In the late 90s, MTV ran a retrospective Where-Are-They-Now special (this was pre-everyone having the internet and knowing where everyone is) on the heavy metal heroes of the late 80s. An interview with Dokken lead singer Don Dokken was surprising in just how unaware he was about his band’s place in the world was. He said that his band’s managers worked with Metallica at the time and would beg him and his mates not to fall in the trap of the LA scene of too much makeup, too much Aquanet, too much handkerchiefs, basically too much opulence. Be like Metallica they said and don’t follow the trends. The band ignored them and Dokken wistfully said—and I quote, “If we listened to them, we could have been Metallica.” No you wouldn’t, Don. No you wouldn’t.

I will not apologize for the Faith No More double-dip, though. Both of these songs were in heavy rotation on MTV and rock radio in the early 90s though not too many people remember the band itself. They had a modest hit later in the decade with the ironic cover of the Commodore’s “Easy (Like Sunday Morning)” but other than that, you didn’t hear too much about them. It’s easy to understand why because the group was ahead of its time. From the rock/rap melding to the band members’ detached, almost ironic sense of being, FNM had no business showing up in the self-absorbed stratosphere of the early 90s.

If you asked a person to tell you something about FNM, a majority would talk about the video for “Epic”, specifically the slow-motion video of a fish who had fallen out of its bowl and was gasping for breath. It wasn’t a particular shocking image, but for some reason it resonated with a lot of viewers. So much so that MTV News felt it was their duty to ask the band about the video. Lead guitarist Jim Martin glibly said, “Well, the fish deserved to be filmed too.” This answer was interesting on many levels in that a. it was a foolish “controversy” to be overly concerned about b. the visuals don’t matter, it’s supposed to be about the music. And c. the answer itself almost a non sequitor in that the interviewer obviously wasn’t concerned about the fish’s popularity but rather the fish’s well-being. Martin brought a sense of absurdity to the interview by turning an incredibly dumb question’s perception completely askew.

I watched a lot of MTV News and saw a lot of celebrities interviewed and that’s the only one that I remember because frankly, I don’t think that anyone else at that time could have given the same response.

Aside from Motley Crue and Living Colour (who I wrote about a few entries back) the rest of the bands are completely anonymous. A few quick hitters on what I remember from them:

Slaughter: the band that girls really loved, mainly because of Mark Slaughter. I thought that they might be kinda cool because I heard Gene Simmons “discovered” them and Gene let Mark wear his leather jacket in the “Fly to the Angels” video. Here’s a potentially embarrassing fact, if I get drunk and I have access to YouTube, I will probably play “Fly to the Angels” at least a half-dozen times. BTW, the line from "Up All Night", "Oh I wish we could stay up, 24 hours a day!" is perhaps the whiniest line ever song by a band that wanted to look cool or tough. Man, that was terrible. 

Kix: the name sounds like Kiss, but the band sounds like Great White. In fact, I get those two bands confused all the time. I owned the tape these two songs came from and I don’t think that I could name any other song these guys did.

LA Guns: I wonder if the Jayne from the “Ballad of Jayne” is the same Jane from Jane’s Addiction’s “Jane Says” (despite the spelling differences)? Probably not but  that last sentence holds the records for most times I’ve ever written the name Jane in any permutation of the name. I remember hearing that lead guitarist Tracii Guns was in a band with Axl Rose and that’s how the name Guns N Roses came to be. The story goes on to say that Axl kicked Tracii out and replaced him with Slash, but kept the name. Wikipedia says this story checks out, so good work AHS rumor mongers! Anyway, I always felt sorta bad for Guns and thought that he had to be kicking himself that he wasn’t actually in the multi-platinum band that was partly named after him.

Warrant: This band is usually short-hand for being part of the terrible rock scene that is being covered with this cassette. And for good reason, I suppose. I have no idea what a Down Boy is and I don’t remember caring too much. The one thing that I found refreshing about lead singer Jani Lane is that in that same MTV retrospective that I referred to earlier, he talks about going to the band’s record company in 1992 and seeing a huge poster of “Cherry Pie” hanging over the secretary’s desk. A year later, the poster was replaced by Alice In Chains. He then thought, “Crap. We’re probably in big trouble.”

He certainly was.