(1975, Lifesong Records)
This one goes back to my dad too, as he played the hell out of some Jim Croce. And honestly, I still do. (I think there's a couple more Jim Croce records on this list, but I can't quite remember.) This was a posthumous double LP collection of some of his real folksy ass early stuff, and one whole side was his talking things, kind of like spoken word shit I guess, but more of a stoned dude telling you stories than any sort of direct, to-the-point effort. My dad loved that side of this record, where Jim Croce was talking about taking pills and how the Chinese would all sweep at once or swimming in condom-infested Philly water or dating fat bitches. It was good stuff.
To be honest, as a goofy ass whiteboy who writes lyrics of the hip hop variety almost nightly, I've gotten bored with a lot of hip hop influences, as it's always linguistical or word-based, and often the visual imagery is sacrificed to sing song repeat the same sounds 24 lines in a row. I've been trying to emulate guys like Croce, who, in eight lines, would paint a crystal clear picture of very common characters, but it was all so underclass and outlaw. I'm halfway glad Croce died as he did, to save us from him becoming some washed-up musician who emulated his pop successes to a fault and ended up making string-heavy character songs about characters he never saw in real life. It's better he left us.
The liner notes inside this album were extensive, at least for me at that time. I had never read a guy's lifestory inside a gatefold, and I even winged a book report (biography was the category for that month's book report) off these liner notes. There was no internet, so I could do that bullshit. Mrs. Pride was my teacher and she might've suspected, but she probably passed me for my in-depthness and selling of the angle. I was a hard worker at fucking off. Mrs. Pride has been in a coma since last spring. Her and her husband were driving home, not too far from where my grandfolks live, when some gung ho ass cop, hellbent on respoding to a shots fired call in the projects, was flying down back roads in his cruiser with no sirens or lights going, and head-onned Mrs. Pride and her husband. Husband was DOA, and Mrs. Pride, who was principal of the high school when this happened, was left in a coma. I haven't heard in a minute on her status, but even if she came to, she couldn't have been in good shape. And she was one of those teachers that was no-nonsense but not a dick at all.
Of course, Farmville, where I grew up near, was where they shut down public schools for six years in response to desegregation, and a white cop without emergency lights in a Crown Vic killing and comatosing a prominent black couple lit up tensions that are always simmering. But seriously, it's not black or white. Fuck that cop.
No comments:
Post a Comment