Hip-Hop’s grand summer was 20 years ago. The grand winter was 15 years ago. I briefly mentioned one of the albums a couple weeks ago, but I’m gonna go into a little more detail this time. Next rip, we’ll go into a little more detail on the other.
Bring da Ruckus - It’s not too often that a record snatches me up right from the fist listen of the first song. Bring Da Ruckus did just that. Being that I’m from the school of boom-bap, this was theeee track to grab my attention. Slow and serious. The track alone sounds like the entrance music for somebody who’s gonna come in and wreak havoc.
Shame On A Nigga - Most important thing about this track was the introduction to my favorite member of the Wu, Ol’ Dirty. Ol’ Dirty was that dude. I don’t know if it’s just me, but as soon as I heard dude’s name, he was my favorite. Then he started rhymin, and kickin the most off-the-wall stuff I YEVER heard. The dude said, dirty, i keep shit stains in my drawls so i can get fizzi-funky for you. Problem. And again, the track was fantastic.
Clan In Da Front - GZA being the genius he is, running the acrostic rhyme, using names of old school Black movies. A good track, but not necessarily one that I repeated, but it was a nice move-along from one major record to the next.
Wu-Tang: 7th Chamber - We’ll talk about the actual track on the 2nd go-around. The first version of the song is most memorable for the skit at the beginning. But what a great skit it is. Not the best one on the album, but definitely up there. One of my favorite lines from that time came from that skit. Niggas came over wit 40s and blunts, kid.. If you saw me in 94, it was almost guaranteed that you’d hear that line.
Can It Be All So Simple/ Intermission - Raekwon and Ghostface. The first hint at the greatness to come. The real gem here was hearing Method Man introduce the whole group.
Da Mystery of Chessboxin’ - The intro to what would be side 2, and one of my favorite songs on the whole album. Actually, even though the whole album is classic, side 2 KILLS side 1. U-God got his only good verse off on here. I don’t even know how many verses he got off on the rest of the album, but this one was worth a good couple points off the bench. As much as I appreciated Ol’ Dirty on side one, it was his verse on Chessboxin’ that cemented him as my favorite.
Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing Ta F’ With - He flipped the Underdog theme? Soon as I heard that, it was a wrap. They coulda had somebody readin the phone book for the rest of the album and I would’ve thought this was a classic.
C.R.E.A.M. - I got a confession to make. I didn’t like CREAM at first. The production on the whole rest of the album - with the exception of Can It Be All So Simple - was dirty boom-bap. CREAM came in all smooth and whatnot. I was not feelin it. At all. It actually took years before I started to like this song. But then, all of a sudden, something happened and that piano sample hypnotized me. It was the combination of the piano and Deck’s verse.
Method Man - Let’s talk about that torture skit. There was not much in the world foolin with that joint at the time. Until the Fugees came out with the Chinese Store skit, it was the hands-down greatest skit of all time.
And then there’s the song. The song was decent. Method Man was quite the character, but I didn’t see why he had a solo joint when nobody else did. Don’t get it twisted, I liked the song, but I wanted Ol’ Dirty to be gettin that shine.
Protect Ya Neck - This was the first Wu-Tang song I heard. I think I heard it in the late spring/early summer of 93. The only reason it stood out to me was that I’d read about it in The Source. But as soon as I heard it, I knew this was that joint they was talkin about. With the classic Wu lineup, Deck leading off and GZA closing it down.
Tearz - I might be one of the few people who really, really liked this song. This was one of those joints that consistently made it to the mix tapes I made at the time. This was the song with the obligatory safe sex message that every record back then seemed to hafta have. Thinkin about it has me geeked up enough to make a ring tone outta the instrumental.
Wu-Tang: 7th Chamber, pt 2 - A proper rhyme has a good dismount. That is, it should end with a good shut-down line that gives the listener a sense of completion. 7th Chamber Pt 2 is a dismount track with a dismount line. Exact same lyrics as the first one, but the track? Awww, man. That synth? The the cut-ins? The wuuu-uuu-uuu-uuuuu-U. Everything. This is how you end an album. Except for dude talking at the end. That kinda messes it up for me. But when I think of the song, I really don’t even think of that part.
36 Chambers is the template of what a raw - and I do mean raw album should sound like. Raw not only in terms of the beats and rhymes, but in terms of all the miscues. Method Man coming in off-cue on CREAM, jokers clearing their throats before their verses, starting the tapes late…everything. But it’s those errors that give the record part of it’s character. And on an album that has a lot of characters, it’s this song that displays it all. (Even better, the weakest link does not appear.)
Sometimes, it’s not what you say, it’s what you don’t say. All the rah-rah stuff at the beginning, you’d expect from Busta Rhymes. It’s the part from about :55 to 1:06 that’s really interesting. That was pretty much my reaction exactly.
In addition to having the World Series champions, Philly has the all-time champion news theme. Move Closer To Your World, which is the Channel 6 Action News theme, is completely unfadeable. No other news theme comes close.
Okay, I’m tryin to find a record and I know next to nothing about it.
So back when I first started listening to jazz 20 years ago, I used to make tapes off the radio, but I never recorded the info on the songs. The song in question was on a tape that I lost 20 years ago. At any rate, here’s what I know:
There were only 3 instruments in the trio: a bass, a guitar, and a sax. I think the bassist was Oscar Pettiford.
That’s all I know. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
The bol, Blackink got me siced up on 4th Chamber last week, so I’ve been listening to it a lot. In the process, I’ve been listening to GZA’s verse. One of those times, the thought literally popped into my mind, I feel sorry for people who don’t like hip-hop. GZA’s verse is that good. Sickening, actually. That “disciplinary action…” line, that’s one of those ‘I-remember-where-I-was-when-I-heard’ moments.
The banks of G, all CREAM downs a bet
Money feed good, opposites off the set
It ain’t hard to see, my seeds need God-degree
I got mouths to feed, unnecessary beef is more cows to breed
I’m on some tax free shit by any means
Whether bound to hit scheme or some counterfeit CREAM
I learned much from such with cons who run scams
Veterans got the game spiced like ham
And from that, sons are born and guns are drawn
Clips are fully loaded, and then blood floods the lawn
Disciplinary action was a fraction of strength
that made me truncate the length one-tenth
With his thump, tweeters hits like air pumps
RZA shaped the track, niggaz caught razor bumps
Scarred tryin to figure who invented
this unprecented, opium-scented, dark-tinted
Now watch me blow him out his shoes without clues
Cuz I won’t hesitate to detonate, I’m short fuse
Now that the election’s over and all the euphoria has subsided, or at least quelled somewhat, the reality of the situations can come back into focus. I have a couple of big concerns for President-Elect Obama.
The first is that he doesn’t get assassinated. Maybe I’m being wildly pessimistic here, but I’m absolutely not seeing it as out of the question. I hope I’m 180 degrees of wrong on this one, but I’m also hoping that the Secret Service is extra-vigilant. And that if they’re not, that P-E O has his head on a swivel the whole time.
In a totally different vein, I’m kinda nervous about this because of all the expectations. This is like when Patrick Ewing got picked by the Knicks, only worse. That is to say, given the state of affairs across the board, I’m actually wondering what a successful presidency would look like. Will it be a situation where anything less than a “championship” (whatever that might be) would be considered to be a failure because of the high expectations, or will the fervor temper into something more manageable?
This is a question I’m gonna be asking of my go-hard friends. What will a successful term look like?
Readin between the lines, it probably wasn’t too hard to figure that I was gonna break for Obama. Here’s why: I like him better.
Now, I’m aware enough to give some more substantive policy-based reasons than that, but at the end of the day, that’s pretty much what did it. It wasn’t because he’s Black - there have been plenty of elections where there was a Black dude running against a white dude and I went with the white dude (unlike 98% of boxing matches and 100% of TV game shows), but this ain’t one of em. This is the 5th Presidential election that I’ve been eligible to vote, and the 7th that I’ve been cognizant of. I picked right in all but one, and that was Gore, so I really can’t be said to have picked wrong on that one. But suffice it to say that in all the presidential elections I’ve observed, I have yet to see two real candidates going at it. Lately, I’ve seen candidates and foils. (The lone exception was Bush-Gore 2000, which, I think was pretty much two foils goin at it.) The 2004 election was less Bush vs. Kerry than it was a referendum on Bush — it was Bush vs. Not-Bush. This year, the candidate is Obama. This whole election is about him. You could replace McCain with just about anybody, because the specifics don’t really matter; either you’re voting for Obama or you’re voting against Obama. The identity of the other guy is not really important. That’s not necessarily to say that I think Obama will win handily, or even win, but I think that he’s the stronger candidate by far. That’s pretty much why.
Well, that’s one of the reasons. The other reason is the Vice-President. On the dead serious, even the tangential possibility of a Palin presidency worries me. It scares me in a way that walking around some of Philly’s more…uhhh…”trafficky” neighborhoods in the middle of the night never did. I told my mom the other day, with not a hint of hyperbole, that if by some sequence of events Palin became the president, I’d seriously consider leaving the country. No sicin. Essentially, I don’t think she’s ready to become a national politician. I think she’s probably good for the levels where she’s operated so far, but at this point, when it comes to national and international politics, she ain’t ready yet. I suppose my biggest concern is that she may never be. I mean, it’s one thing to question Obama’s sincerity on certain issues, or whether everything he says expresses a consistent viewpoint, like my man, Jeremy, does, but those issues tend to be fairly nuanced discussions. With Palin we’re talking about high school stuff: geography, the functions of the Vice President under the Constitution, what the First Amendment says…those shouldn’t be ostensible “trap” questions or fodder for the satire shows. Now I could be dead wrong. She might be ready to lead the country tomorrow afternoon. But I hope to God I never need to find out.
Conservative media activists should be siced about the new report from the American Association of Pediatrics that links teen pregnancies and television shows. They’ve been arguing this for years, while people have consistently denied it. Now the media activists have the proof of a longitudinal study to back their assertions.
The new study is the first to link those viewing habits with teen pregnancy, said lead author Anita Chandra, a Rand Corp. behavioral scientist. Teens who watched the raciest shows were twice as likely to become pregnant over the next three years as those who watched few such programs.
Previous research by some of the same scientists had already found that watching lots of sex on TV can influence teens to have sex at earlier ages.
Shows that highlight only the positive aspects of sexual behavior without the risks can lead teens to have unprotected sex “before they’re ready to make responsible and informed decisions,” Chandra said.
The study was released Monday in the November issue of Pediatrics. It involved 2,003 12- to 17-year-old girls and boys nationwide questioned by telephone about their TV viewing habits in 2001. Teens were re-interviewed twice, the last time in 2004, and asked about pregnancy. Among girls, 58 became pregnant during the follow-up, and among boys, 33 said they had gotten a girl pregnant.
Participants were asked how often they watched any of more than 20 TV shows popular among teens at the time or which were found to have lots of sexual content. The programs included “Sex and the City,” “That ’70s Show” and “Friends.”
Pregnancies were twice as common among those who said they watched such shows regularly, compared with teens who said they hardly ever saw them. There were more pregnancies among the oldest teens interviewed, but the rate of pregnancy remained consistent across all age groups among those who watched the racy programs.
There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that there are some folks who are gonna try to question the validity of the findings for any number of reasons, but really, the results are fairly intuitive. You aim towards what you focus on. For teens who focus on sex, particularly the glamorized, consequence-free, television version, there’s a likelihood that they’re gonna experiment and find the sometimes-ugly truth behind the image.
Lookin at the Giants - Cowboys game, the Cowboys look really bad. Horrible. Some of it — okay, a lot of it — is the fact that they’re missing their starting quarterback, but gaaaa-lee!! These jokers don’t really even look competitive. A few weeks ago, everybody thought they were gonna be the toast of the league, but now they’re just lookin’ like toast. The bye can’t come at a better time for them. They need to get healthy both physically AND mentally. I ain’t gon’ lie, I severely underestimated the Giants and I WAAAAAYYYY overestimated the Cowboys. To the extent that I’m almost embarrassed by it. And I don’t even fool with the Cowboys like that.
Even better than that, the Eagles are beating the Seahawks (but not scoring touchdowns!!), which means that they’ll be out of the basement in the NFCE. That’s crazy. 5-3 would be enough to be the division leader in some divisions, and they’re in 3rd. This is tough football. But what it really means is that if the Eagles are gonna make a move, they’re gonna hafta play better in the 2nd half of the season. Historically, they’ve been better after the bye than before it, but I’m still not seeing them doing too much if they can’t do a better job of getting touchdowns. Field golas ain’t gonna do it against the Giants.
As a total side note, I’m kinda trippin that the Bears’ corporate sponsor is Cadillac. So on their press conferences, you have a Black man standin in front of a Cadillac sign. I’m crackin’ up. Reminds me of the old Flip Wilson joke: “95% of Cadillac owners say, ‘Them white people can sho make some shaaarp cars.’”
I’m really interested in the R*s game tomorrow. The Stillers will be good test for them. If they’re as good as they seem, they’ll win. If they’re not quite the upper-echelon team they seem to be, that’ll show too. The Steelers are actually a known quantity. They’re gonna play defense. You know that. The difference in whether they win or lose is on the offensive line. If Ben gets some protection, they’ll win. If they don’t, then the Stillers will be 0-fer against the NFCE.
With the Titans being 8-0, but not getting anything significant from the quarterback, the commentators are lauding Kerry Collins. I wonder whether they’d be saying the same thing if Vince Young were putting up similar numbers with the same results. We can discount Merril Hoge, cuz if VY won 19 games, got regular season, Super Bowl, AND Pro Bowl MVP, and cured AIDS, cancer, AND diabetes, Hoge would still have somethin’ negative to say. Aside from that unadulterated, 98-octane hate, I’m curious what it would sound like.
Jared’s Broncos and Brotherbrown’s Chargers…well, uhhh…like I told my bol, who’s a veteran (read: jaded) Eagles fan like myself, you never know what can happen in the 2nd half of the season. All you really gotta do is MAKE the playoffs. Once you get there, whatever happens happens. The Giants last year should give hope to everybody. Cuz if you remember this time last year, the question wasn’t whether Tom Coughlin would be fired, it was how many playoff games he’d hafta win to save his job. Super Bowl wasn’t even in question. So anything can happen. To quote a famous country preacher, Keep hope alive!
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