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. 

Top 19 -- N.W.A.: Straight Outta Compton

On Facebook I was asked to list my top ten all-time albums that most influenced me. Since I can't list anything without a huge explanation, this is it. Not only that but I'm writing about my Top 19 instead of my Top 10. 

Here's what I wrote on Facebook today, "Here's another quick story: when I first heard this album, I was about 15-years-old. When you're 15-years-old, there is a weird dichotomy in your brain. You want to be part of a group, but at the same time, you want to be unique. You want to tell the entire world to go fuck itself but at the same time you're deathly afraid of doing so. You done with being a kid but you can't begin to handle adult responsibilities. Therefore you begin to find ways of trying to express yourself, your frustrations, your confusion, find someone or something that has similar problems; otherwise you might explode. For me, it was this cassette tape put out by five guys who were figuratively and literally the opposite of me and my entire surroundings. They expressed the frustrations and confusion that I was experiencing every day. Maybe what they were rapping about wasn't exactly relatable--I didn't have a problem with the police or women weren't rying to convince me that they were carrying my baby--but the emotions that they conveyed did."

I've written about NWA a lot. Probably more than any other band that I've listened to, which is weird because they only really had one album that I liked. The other two, "100 Miles and Runnin' " and "Efil4Zaggin" had their moments, but once Ice Cube left, the band sort of fell apart into a self-parody of what they once were. 

So I think what prompts me to continuously write about a band--actually an album--that I really loved when I was 15-years-old is how it made me feel at that age. Like I wrote up top, there's a lot of pushing and pulling in a teenager's head. You need to make sure that you get that frustration out before it boils over. Just be listening to "Straight Outta Compton" allowed me to relieve some of that pressure. It was loud, it was aggressive, it was in-your-face, it didn't give a fuck. All of those things are the opposite of me. When I rapped along with NWA, I wasn't Byron Magrane anymore. I was someone completely different. 

And I think that's why this album was such a hit with a lot of kids that I knew. Sure, the words and what they say are shocking the first 100 times you listen to them. After awhile though, if you're still listening, the message is even more reticent. Like everyone wants to be in a gang--I'm not talking about the crips or the bloods--I'm talking about being in a group of people with like minded thoughts. Not only that but you want your gang on the outside. There's no fun in being the favorite, the underdog, the downtrodden, the group that's going to rise up and show those bourgeois pigs who's boss was where you wanted to be. You want to be the group of people who sees through the bullshit and speaks truth to power. 

That was NWA. This group was popular, but they couldn't get on MTV or the radio. They sold millions of albums, yet you never saw them on any late night shows. They were the World's Most Dangerous Band and when you're 15 or 16-years-old, that's how you feel. No one really recognizes you. You're doing stuff, some of it great, but no one cares. In fact the only responses you get are negative. "Clean your room!" "Do your homework!" "Dump that beer in the fire!" "Run 15 laps!" 

You're powerless and it sucks. You know who else was powerless? Ice Cube, MC Ren, Dr. Dre, Eazy E and Yella Boy. You know who fought back? That's right, NWA. If they can do it, why couldn't we? At least that was the theory. 

One day we were all talking. The annual lip-sync was approaching and they were looking for acts. Wouldn't it be awesome if a bunch of us did "Fuck the Police"? Could you imagine the principal and the vice principal and everyone else totally freaking out? They'd talk about us for years! We'd be the (very white) NWA of Amesbury, MA. The more we talked about it, the more a plan formed. "I have a White Sox, Raiders and LA Kings hat!" "I have these awesome Locs!" "I know the dude who does the PA for the lip sync, we can tell them that we're going to do 'Express Yourself' and at the last minute substitute 'Fuck the Police'!" 

We must have talked about this plan for hours, getting us more and more excited. The lip-sync day came and went, and myself and my friends sat in the audience. We never put the plan into action. In fact, I don't think we ever talked about it again. 

We weren't NWA. We weren't anywhere even close. We were just four scared white boys who talked shit and never backed it up. NWA may as well have been Spider-Man or Bat Man; we'd never be like them. That's okay. Not everyone can be iconoclasts. That's what makes them special. The rest of us just have to bask in their glory and dream. 

Jeff Sellers 1989 Topps

On April 15, 2019 I received this card from the Baseball Card Bandit (BCB):

I haven't written anything about this card on Facebook, because I'm writing about it here first. Pictured in the above card is former Red Sox prospect Jeff Sellers. 

Was he a real prospect? I'm not sure if he was really a prospect or just a young pitcher who Boston hoped would be the next big thing. I've discussed this before, but after Roger Clemens came along until Aaron Sele, the Red Sox had a dearth of pitching prospects. All of a sudden they couldn't  find a pitching prospect at all, which is weird because there was a pretty good pipeline of Sox hurlers who debuted in the early 80s and went on to have pretty good careers: Clemens, Bruce Hurst, Oil Can Boyd, John Tudor, Bobby Ojeda and Al Nipper. Just look at the starting four of the 86 ALCS team, it was Clemens, Hurst, Boyd and Nipper (with an aging Tom Seaver). That's not a bad rotation at all. All I know is that the Sox front office seemed to pivot from finding pitching to finding hitting sometime in the 1980s -- don't ask me why they couldn't concentrate on both. 

Back to Jeff Sellers. Before we get into the tragedy that was Jeff Sellers' career, guess where he was born? Compton, California. I wonder if he knew Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, MC Ren, Eazy-E and Yella? Even if you hated rap, wouldn't you buy "Straight Outta Compton" because of civic pride?

Anyway. 

I became obsessed with baseball beginning with the 1986 season, but when I opened packs of 1987 Topps, I had no idea who Jeff Sellers was. I don't recall him pitching for the Red Sox in 1986, but it turns out he pitched in 14 games that season and four in 1985--his first start was a win against the Milwaukee Brewers.  Maybe he was some sort of secret rookie, the kind that comes out of nowhere and has a great career, completely flummoxing those whose job it is to know better. 

But he wasn't a ninja rookie. He was just a guy with a perfectly square head who get would get said head kicked in most times he started a game. He didn't have a lot of strikeouts--he was a sinker baller--and his career ERA was a whisker away from 5.00 (it was 4.97). He probably should have been a back-of-the-bullpen, swingman type; but at least according to the back of his baseball card, the Red Sox didn't think so. He appeared in 61 games and started 51 of them. 

In 1988 he, Todd Benzinger and the always-popular Player to be Named Later were sent to the Cincinnati Reds for Nick Esasky and Rob Murphy. Murphy had a real good year coming out of the pen in 1989, but was awful in 1990. Esasky had a monster year for the Sox in 1989, before signing  big deal with the Braves in December 1989 and then contracting vertigo and never playing again. Benzinger played a couple of seasons with his hometown Reds, catching the final out of the 1990 World Series, before bouncing around the league and retiring in 1995. 

After the 1988 season, Jeff Sellers never threw another pitch in the major leagues. With his new team, he got injured in Spring Training with Cincinnati and his arm never healed right. Like his trademate Benzinger, Sellers spent the next few years trying to hook on with the Yankees, Rangers and Rockies before calling it quits in 1994. Unlike Benzinger, Sellers banged around the bushes and played in the minor leagues for those organizations. 

What really must make Sellers angry is that his last game was by far his best. On October 1, 1988, Jeff Sellers had ten strikeouts and a no-hitter through 7 2/3 innings before Cleveland Indian outfielder Luis Medina launched a homer. That was the only run Sellers gave up, but he lost 1-0, former Red Sox manager John Farrell got the victory. That was Sellers' final major league game ever. 

When I started thinking about this entry, the only thing that I remembered about Sellers is the Cincinnati/Boston trade. As I was thinking about it, I started trying to think of angles of how to approach this blog: imagining what it's like to be the "throw-in" in a multiplayer deal or trying to figure out how I would feel about being the fourth best player in a four-person transaction. But after doing a little bit of research, the Jeff Sellers story is bigger than that one transaction. 

It has to suck to be 24-years-old and on the last day of the year, pitch the best game of your life. You spend your entire winter thinking of that last game and how things are going to start changing. Then you get traded. The Reds wanted him, maybe they thought that they'd catch lightning in a bottle with a youngish guy who had already made some mistakes. 

Sellers probably heard this too. You think about how you're starting your prime now and getting a whole new start with a new team in a new league, this is going to be your year. Then, BOOM!, you get hurt. Of all the things that can happen, that's the worst. Especially when your manager is notorious steak head Pete Rose, who was also going through some stuff in 1989. Things were starting to finally line up your way, you know that baseball is full of stories of guys who go to a new team and get a new lease on life, why couldn't you be the next chapter of that story? But instead you got really hurt. 

I wonder how often Jeff Sellers thinks about that moment in 1989 Spring Training? I wonder how many times he talks about how things were this close to changing for him and then he hurt his shoulder, got sent to the minors, tried to pitch through it, hurt his shoulder more, had surgery and was never the same. 

If it was me, I'd probably think about it every single day. 

Carlton Fisk 1992 Upper Deck

On July 27, 2017 I received this card from the Baseball Card Bandit (BCB):

On Facebook, I wrote: The BCB struck again last week. He (I think the BCB is a he, maybe it's a she?) sent a rerun this time: Carlton Fisk. We've already spoken about Fisk, at length, the last time we posted the card. 

I believe this is Fisk's last card and is one of the few times that he's pictured in the Sox' new (for the time) uniforms. Prior to this Fisk was stuck playing in floppy collars or shirts that look like blankets. At least he was able to leave MLB with some dignity. 

2019 Notes: Back in the day, uniform unveiling in sports wasn't a huge deal. Sometimes they'd do these goofy fashion shows during the winter where players would come out, walk around and then writers would write about the new togs. Other times, teams would show up the next season and they were dressed differently. And other times, it was just random. 

At the end of the 1990 season, the Red Sox played the White Sox and Chicago decided that they were going to preview their new uniforms for the 1991 season*. They were black, silver and white (the hot colors of the time, thank you Los Angeles Raiders and N.W.A.). I was instantly intrigued by these new uniforms. Especially the away ones, it said Chicago in black and white on the front and there was a patch of a white sock on a black diamond on the left sleeve. Look at the back of the card in the image above, the whole uniform looked awesome. 

Add to the fact that this was the series where Tom Brunansky made his famous catch in right field off Ozzie Guillen to win the 1990 AL East and there were already a lot of feelings tied up in these threads. When I was a kid, I didn't care about the White Sox at all. To me, they were an anonymous team who shared the Windy City with the Cubs. Ron Kittle? Ivan Calderon? Britt Burns? Who cared. 

But all of a sudden, I couldn't stop thinking about the White Sox. Their entire look changed and it did it's job, I was now thinking about the White Sox. They weren't so anonymous any more. 

So much so, they were the first official jersey that I ever bought. The following fall, I went to the mall with my birthday money and bought that official Chicago White Sox away jersey and wore it to school a lot. 

The thing is, the White Sox have had a million uniforms over their first 90 years of existence. It seemed like they changed jersey every other year, but they really haven't touched their uniform since 1991. They add a throw back (they were the first to do that, BTW) or they may take a patch off here, add one there, but for the most part their looks has been consistent -- even if the team isn't. 

* BTW, their old uniforms weren't bad. They got a new set of uniforms in 1987 (along with the Braves, A's, Mariners, Twins and others) that got rid of their gaudy early 80s style beach blanket bingo jerseys and replaced them with a more conservative appearance. They were red, white and blue and spelled out "White Sox" on their home unis and "Chicago" on their roads. The hat even had a "C" on it instead of saying "SOX" for the first time in like 50 years. The problem was, they went completely the other way and were boring as hell. 

Also, look at Carlton, he's playing first base against the Angels. What a good baseball boy. 

BTW the letter was cancelled in North Carolina. Maybe the BCB is Michael Jordan? No one can know for certain!

2019: Some times people need to take away my keyboard. Ugh. 

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 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 XIV

Kashmir – Led Zeppelin

Crazy – Seal

Down Boys – Warrant

Love Song – Tesla

Gonna Make You Sweat – C+C Music Factory

Photograph – Def Leppard

Scared – Dangerous Toys

Fuck Tha Police – NWA

Boys of Summer – Don Henley

3AM Eternal – The KLF

Never Enough – LA Guns

Fly to the Angels – Slaughter

Jackin’ for Beats – Ice Cube

Hoo boy. This is a weird one to listen to again.

What I mean by that is, for a tape that was crafted (ha, crafted – so pretentious) in 1993, this has a feeling of a cassette that was made three years prior. As I was listening to it earlier today, I was trying to figure out exactly what message I was trying to convey.

And I think that message was simple, “I wish I was back in high school.” And this is a strange message because I was very happy with Merrimack College and while I enjoyed my time at Amesbury High School, I didn’t want to go back at all. So maybe that wasn’t it. Perhaps I just wanted a tape of all the crappy music I enjoyed when my primary address was my parents’ house.

In either case, I couldn’t have picked better songs to elicit tones of home.

Seal’s “Crazy” is still a terrific tune. When it came out, I remember being absolutely blown away. It was psychedelic and creepy with lyrics suggesting something bigger was going on behind the scenes. It was as if Seal was taking the listener on a chill, yet paranoid acid trip wondering who are the gun-toting “yellow people that walk through his head”?

Like many of the descriptors that I use to explain my fascination with certain songs, it all begins with that hypnotic beat that lures the listener into this weird audial world. It’s dreamy and ethereal and things seem to flow along those lines until the drum hits and it begins to pick up speed. It reminds me of the boat ride in the original “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” where the kids think that they’re in for a nice float down a chocolate river, but ends up being a psychedelic hell ride of chickens without heads and giant visages of Slugworth.

Seal doesn’t quite go that far, but the dreamy world of the song’s beginning runs in sharp contrast as to the pointed nightmares that make up the remainder of the tune. I had high hopes for Seal after this song as I thought that he was going to release weird, trippy songs for the rest of his career* but he ended up cutting off his dreads, releasing adult-oriented pop, getting married to Heidi Klum and becoming insanely rich. I guess him not making weird songs kind of worked for him.

* After he release “Let Love Rule”, I also had the same thoughts about Lenny Kravitz too. But he didn’t do it either. In fact, he cut off his dreads, made (less-than-original) adult-oriented pop, married Lisa Bonet and became insanely rich. I somehow dislike Kravitz more than Seal though I’m not sure exactly why. There’s a lot of Kravitz coming up soon, I’m sure I’ll get into it more.

There are times when you add a song to a mix because you want to set the mood. If you’re lifting weights, you add Rage Against the Machine or Dangerous Toys. If you’re trying to woo a young lady, first off you don’t say you’re “Wooing her” and second, you add a little Jeff Buckley or Tesla to the mix. I don’t know what the hell I was trying to do when I added C+C Music Factory*.

* Or if you’re into puns and from Amesbury, MA: C+C Pizza Factory. God, I hate myself sometimes.

There is no excuse for this song anytime, anywhere. And I apologize for introducing this earworm to your brain right now. It wasn’t cool and I deeply regret it.

Like most dance tracks, this song is forgettable. The one thing that I remember is the CONTOVERSY! that this video created when it was aired regularly on MTV. Much like Velvet Underground, C+C Music Factory had a supermodel who hung around with them and “sang” with them. Her name was Zelma Davis and because she was draw-droppingly attractive, she had a lot of face time in the video.

Also around this time, it was found that Milli Vanilli did not sing any of their vocals on their record. For some reason this was a big deal back then. I mean, a really, Really, REALLY big deal. Milli Vanilli were pariahs and never worked again, then one of them killed himself. Like I said, people went a bit bonkers about this at the time. During the same time, it came out that Zelma Davis did not really sing. Most of the hooks were sung by former WeatherGirl (who sang “It’s Raining Men”*) and big-boned female Martha Wash.

Unfortunately, Ms. Wash did not have the aesthetics that a group as serious as C+C Music Factory was going for, so they had her sing the songs and told the world that that was Zelma Davis’ pipes. Not wanting to become a running joke like Milli Vanilli or deprive the world of music inspired by the Arsenio Hall bits, C+C came out and admitted to what happened.

* Everytime I hear “It’s Raining Men” (which is A LOT!) I am reminded of that classic Simpsons scene where Moe kicks Homer out of the bar and removes his favorite song from the jukebox.

Home: “It’s Raining Men”?
Moe: Not no more it ain’t!

Of course it lands in Smithers’ car.
 

Remember when MTV ran videos and in the bottom left-hand corner was that box that told you all the information you need? Band name, song name, album name, label name and the name of the video director. C+C Music Factory’s information looked as if it was written by Dostoyevsky. I’m trying to do this by memory but I remember it reading “Artist name: C+C Music Factory, vocals by Marth Wash, visualized by Zelma Davis”.

Now that I look at it, the name doesn’t seem long, but trust me it looked like a lot of words when you 16, drunk and staring at a TV for hours.

Speaking of videos, the video for the KLF’s “3 AM Eternal” was bizarre. It was a bunch of people in blue robes in a post-apocalyptical world jamming to something called “Justified Ancients of Mu Mu” and singing into hilariously outdated cell phones. I loved it. I loved every damn thing about that song – mostly because I knew nothing about that group (this was pre-Wikipedia and the internet) so my ideas of who these people were, what they were signing about and what they were attempting to do were Seal-level crazy.

For some reason I thought that they were from the Netherlands (actually from England) and I thought that they were singing about something really big. They were not. They were just a band with a prefab mythology that was meant to be mysterious. But I didn’t know that yet.

I was such a naïve kid, I am surprised that I never joined a cult.

Don Henley. Ugh, I hate Don Henley. But almost everyone hates Don Henley, so it’s not like I’m in some special club. But I don’t hate “Boys of Summer”. If you’ve never heard it before, it has nothing to do with the 1955 Brooklyn Dodogers or the Donald Kahn’s book about the 1955 Dodgers.

It’s about a baby-boomer reflecting on his days as a kid. And while baby boomers and their love of their own selves and generation are ranked just a tick below my feelings for Don Henley, nostalgia is nostalgia. And I’m a suck for that crap. Especially when you’re as self-absorbed as I am. Oh no. I am Don Henley, I’ve become what I’ve hated the most. But in some ways, aren’t we all a bit like Don Henley? By hating Don Henley, we really hate ourselves!

Or maybe Don Henley is a pretentious douche who thinks that he’s a little better than everyone, when in reality he’s the third most talented member of a thoroughly mediocre and absolutely boring rock band.

Yeah. That’s more like it.

I’ve mentioned it before, but if there’s one thing that I really like (aside from the untimely death of Don Henley) it’s team-ups and cross-overs. Whether it’s in the movies, or on TV, or in comics; if you stick a character that I like in another medium that I like, I’m there.

Ice Cube’s “Jackin’ for Beats” is the perfect audio team-up, except Cube is a bit of a dick about it. He takes a bunch of beats that have been made popular by other artists of the day (Public Enemy, Digital Underground, D-Nice, among others) and brags about how he’s taking their beats and making them his own.

I’ve never rapped nor do I run in hip hop circles, but I think that taking a beat that is completely identifiable with another rapper or group is like taking that person’s property*. I remember hearing that song for the first time and being shocked that Ice Cube was so brazen in his theft.

* Which is strange because, let’s face it, rappers grab beats that were identified with other musicians and make those songs their own. I’m not going to get into a debate about whether it’s right or wrong, as Bill Belichick is fond of saying, “It is what it is” but do you associate the funk of “Superfreak” with Rick James or MC Hammer?

Brazen or not, it’s a lot of fun to hear Ice Cube rap over these beats and that’s what makes it a great song, even now. And the little shot at the end against NWA? Ice Cube really knows how to twist that knife, doesn’t he.

Speaking of NWA, I really liked “Fuck tha Police” a lot, didn’t I? It’s on just about every Good Songs tape. Enough already, 1993 Byron. You’ve made your point.

Good Songs XII

Jump – Kriss Kross

What it Takes – Aerosmith

Poison – Bell Biv DeVoe

It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday – Boyz II Men

Motownphilly – Boyz II Men

Into the Fire – Dokken

Burning Like a Flame – Dokken

Heroin – Velvet Underground

We Want Eazy – Eazy-E

Radio – Eazy-E

Epic – Faith No More

Falling to Pieces – Faith No More

100 Miles and Runnin’ – NWA

I hate Halloween. I don’t like dressing up. I don’t like the cold in the air as I’m walking around outside--it reminds me that summer is done. I don’t like begging for candy. Even when I wasn’t trick or treating, I still hated Halloween*. For a few years in the mid-90s, Kriss Kross made Halloween bearable for me.

The best and easiest Halloween costume I ever came up with was a Kriss-Kross inspired outfit. I wore a pinstriped Chicago Bulls Starter jersey backwards (before it was a Halloween costume, I loved this shirt unconditionally), a backwards baseball cap and a pair of Z. Cavaricci’s also backwards. It was a good conversation starter, it treaded very slightly on the nostalgia trail and it allowed me to live my fantasy as the Daddy Mack (or Mack Daddy). The only problem was peeing. With the fly in the rear, that was difficult.

* When I got in my 20s, my stance on Halloween softened a bit; mainly because every party I went to was filled with women wearing “sexy blah, blah, blah” costumes. Sexy nurses, sexy Josie and the Pussycats, sexy nuclear technicians, it was a good time. Now that I’m a father of two daughters, karma is going to come back to me two-fold. Therefore, even though I'm no longer dressing up, Halloween still sucks.

I haven’t listened to “Jump” in awhile, but when I was checking it out today, I noticed that there is a lot bravado for a couple of prepubescents. The first line (“Don’t compare us to another Bad Little Fad”) is a shot across the bow to the East Coast Family’s younger members: Another Bad Creation. Coming from a pair whose entire career was built on wearing clothes backwards, that’s a bit aggressive and tone deaf.

Speaking of aggressive, the entire song is full of bitter machismo, striking out at any and all comers. “When they ask if Kriss Kross rocks? You say ‘Believe that’.” I’m not sure exactly why this struck me as odd—in reality it doesn’t, it’s early 90s rap. Aside from PM Dawn there weren't a lot of soft crooners—but maybe it’s because I remember them as two cute little kids rapping that I expected something less pointed.

I owned Another Bad Creation’s “Coolin’ at the Playground, Ya Know!” and they are not represented at all on any Good Songs tape. I liked “Iesha”, I liked “Playground”* so I’m not sure why I didn’t include any of those songs on any of these tapes. I was probably extremely embarrassed to admit owning the tape--I didn't even buy it at the store, I got it through the mail via Columbia House. And if one of those songs ended up on a Good Songs mix, I’d have a lot of explaining to do.

* I know that most people give Snoop Dogg all the credit for popularizing the –izzle speak, which is adding izzle to the end of words. But there is a verse in the ABC song “Playground” that goes “It’s the Miz-ark (the kids’ name was Mark) chillin’ in the piz-ark, I got a break because my momma said to be home by diz-ark.” The question I want is answered is: “Did Snoop Dogg steal from ABC?” because that’s pretty damn whack if true.

I’m pretty sure that I created this tape in the late spring of 1992 because the first two songs have a very AHS-baseball flair to them. What I mean by that is that I borrowed “Totally Krossed Out” from a teammate and another teammate spent the better part of that season singing “What It Takes” at the top of his lungs, at all times. I pretty much despised Aerosmith by this point in my life (a dislike that continues to this very day!) and I was not regularly listening to “Pump” at all. I think that the reason why I included this song is due to my teammate getting this song jammed into my noggin for three months.

In retrospect, it’s probably the best late-career Aerosmith song around. If that’s not damning with faint praise, I don’t know what is.

Looking at the rest of this song list, I was perplexed by the song choices and then it hit me as I was listening to them in order: these were all songs that I used to listen to when I was holed up in my brother’s room playing Nintendo. My brother got a CD player really early and was buying discs with every penny he saved. And since the Nintendo was in his room, I’d end up listening to whatever was in his disc player as I was playing “RBI Baseball” or “Ninja Kid” or “Nintendo Ice Hockey”.

So much so that, “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday” doesn’t make me wistfully remember a friend who has passed away. It makes me wistfully recall when the computer had the pitcher hit a bomb off me in the bottom of the ninth to ruin a perfect game in RBI. Damn you, computerized Brett Saberhagen! Damn you straight to Nintendo Hell!

Boyz II Men was an interesting group, they were part of Michael Bivens’ East Coast Family with Bell Biv DeVoe, ABC and the all-white, all-absent Sudden Impact. They were easily the most talented of the quartet of groups (and I’m making the wild-ass assumption that SI sucked, since we only caught a quick glimpse of them in the “Motownphilly” video pointing and acting “cool”) but I’m not sure if that is like being the valedictorian of summer school. At the very least, they could really sing. In subsequent years, they had a run of number one songs “I’ll Make Love to You” and “On Bended Knee” but then they just disappeared. They show up every once in awhile but usually in that “Remember how wacky the 90s were” type of cameo.

I wonder why they never made it last?

Out of all the songs included on that list, there is one that sticks out like a sore thumb. A good sore thumb, but a sore thumb nonetheless. And that’s the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin”. One of the truths that I have been forced to face during this exercise is that I wasn’t as progressive of a music listener as I once thought. Most of the stuff I really enjoyed were spoon-fed to me by either MTV or the radio. If I did make a foray into something that wasn’t in heavy rotation, it was something in medium rotation*.

* MTV had a show on Sunday nights, called 120 Minutes which played two hours of alternative (before this was a dirty word) music. Stuff like the Pixies, Echo & the Bunnymen, the Cure, maybe Nirvana before “Nevermind”. And we could listen to WFNX beaming from Boston. In thinking back to my high school days, I don’t think that anyone was into that scene at all and I wonder why? The music is really good, certainly better than the tripe that was on the radio and MTV, but I didn’t know anyone who liked that stuff until I went to college. I wonder how different my life would be if I got into that music while in high school?

So I’d love to write about how I found a Velvet Underground and Nico tape in some cutout bin at some mall tape store and that I took it home and my whole world view was magically transformed. Like I was some male version of Janie from VU’s  song “Rock N Roll”. But that’s not the truth. My brother bought the soundtrack to Oliver Stone’s “The Doors” and this song was on that CD.

I guess that there are worse ways of being introduced to a new band. But I remember playing this over and over and over and over again and really liking the tempo and the feeling that song imparted. I have never done heroin, but this song sounded what heroin felt like. The dreamy, slow opening with the drum, the manic, noisy middle of the screeching guitars and a giddy Lou Reed talking about death, to the crashing fade out of ultimately not knowing.

Though I found it on a soundtrack of a movie, it was way more mind-expanding than any other song on this tape (aside from “Falling to Pieces”, I suppose). The old joke is that only 15,000 people bought Velvet Underground’s first album and all 15,000 started rock bands. The humor being that just about every band says their influence is VU. I can’t claim that I’ve been influenced by VU, I’ve listened to a bunch of their stuff and “Heroin” is still my favorite song, but including it on the last Good Songs of high school is a nice departing point for college.