In 1992 a perfect storm occurred. The Beastie Boys had recently released the crazy Check Your Head tape, which dabbled and dipped back into their punk rockish roots, and yet more white kids than ever were into hip hop, mega-fueled by the weed-happy twang of Cypress Hill, not to mention the gangsta musings of the post N.W.A west coast. You combine that with a national campaign to get people to drink Mickey's 22 ounce bottles of malt liquor affectionately dubbed Hornets, with a bee pointing a stinger on the top - much more appropriate for white folks than the southern plantation malt liquor imagery of bulls and horses like Blue Bull and Colt 45, and it all went together with the token white rapper from Ice-T's Rhyme Syndicate re-inventing himself as Irish as a motherfucker, to make him seem, you know, not so cul-de-sac white and more gangsta white. Throw in a couple twangy DJ Muggs beats, and BAMM! you got House of Pain-mania sweeping America. Motherfucks were all up on that shit.
It's funny with a lot of these tapes, listening to them now, and how some stand the test of time and some don't. Everlast's rhyme style has some nice repetition of linguistical sounds, but not that clever. It's almost as if he can't wait a whole line to rhyme something, so he just does half-time rhyming within each line. And Danny Boy is like a far shittier understudy of Everlast. In fact, this is a pretty shitty tape all told. But still, you can't deny the pure perfect storm high tide of "Jump Around", and I know it's the hipster hip hop dork's thing to suck Pete Rock's dick and mention his remix of this song as early testament to his greatness, but fuck, that original version with the annoyingly catchy Muggs-topian horns is hard to not smile with reminiscing happiness when you hear it.
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