(1992, Elektra Records)
At one point at dumpin.net, me and Mike Dikk pretended we were going to list and blurb out the Top 100 All-Time Greatest Hip Hop Jamz of All-Ever as decided by Expert Whiteboys who are heavily steeped into the hip hop and smarter than all other whiteboys and some black dudes too, especially ones that grew up in the suburbs. This is what I wrote about this song when we were doing that...
"When all this shit was coming out, I was dropping near a hundred bucks a week on new full-length tapes and vinyl singles, probably averaging five or six singles a week. I had both the "360" single and this single. The Puba single, and I was a big Puba fan because it was awesome that a guy with a face that looked like it got stung by a thousand bees could be a sex symbol of some sort, has long been sold off, but I still have that Brand Nubian single. And I still play it regularly. I know internet dork computer preservation fuckwad would want to put it to digitalization and save the vinyl for some far-off never-reached ebay value level, but fuck it, I bought the shit, it's mine and I'm gonna play it till it breaks. I might even go draw some shitty graffiti tag on it with a silver Sharpie right now, maybe write PARLAY in really bad 34-year-old white man cholo letters.
This song is great. I had the One For All tape, and wasn't too bummed when they broke up because like everybody mistakenly thought at the time, I thought Puba was carrying the group. This single proved that wrong completely. In fact, other than this single, I don't know what notable non-Brand Nubian albums any of these guys did (although I've been meaning to "obtain" Jamar's album from last year for a while now). And them being split up made you realize that. I think one of the last actual brand new rap tapes I bought before the form became obsolete was their reunion Foundation tape, and it's a good tape, with a grown folks vibe. More shit about community and kids growing up right and all, which jibes well with my family-oriented drunken lifestyle. However, the penultimate rap jams are not about overall concepts of community and making the world better. It's about raw emotion. And you let Diamond sample the horns from Rocky for a thick-booted beat, and then Sadat and Lord J kick a couple of fags in the face lyrically, and that's a motherfuckin' song. (The B-side of the single has a remix where Diamond gets on the track as well, which is neat if you've never heard it, but nothing compared to the original song.)"
Looking back, I would say the one thing that's changed in my opinions for you is that I really like the remix featuring Diamond a whole lot more now, probably because I made myself a screwed and chopped boom bap NYC singles from the early '90s mix through Audacity and used it. Also, I think Diamond is still the world's best kept secret, and any white person into the rap music who doesn't like Diamond and embrace Diamond and tout Diamond should not be considered a for-real rap fan. This is the curse of the white man's mind thinking about hip hop - it always has to be truer to whatever than the next white man's mind, so that we claw at each other's credibility like crab's in a barrel.
Another thing about this single, when I was in college, we used to do acid a lot, and we'd wander, which was a great way to meet homeless people in early '90s Richmond, Virginia. I remember on the billboard above the Hardee's between Grace and Broad Street, there was a credit card ad for a while, and somebody - probably an art student at the school there - climbed up and tagged a thick and drippy "PUNKS JUMP UP TO GET BEAT DOWN" across the bottom of the billboard. I always thought that was awesome. Nowadays, post-Banksy/Shepard Fairey making Obamaganda for profit, I'd find it annoying. And I wouldn't be able to do acid because all they'd have is pharmaceuticals in the dorms. Stupid world, leaving me behind. At least I still have my trusty old Brand Nubian sans-Puba's swollen face 12-inch single to play on my old-fashioned record playing machine.
2 comments:
God, I remember that Hardees. It took me a minute, because at first I was thinking you were talking about the Burger King at Grace and Laurel, which became a Mr. Sub and finally a joint called Sahara with decent falafel, but then I remembered that there was a Hardees up there on the corner of Shafer and Broad, which was gone even before the Burger King was gone, probably 1994. That building isn't even still there--VCU built a dorm on top of where it was, and the old Citizen Gallery where I saw Action Patrol is gone too, and I guess there's a 5 Guys there now, which I eat at on the regular now that I'm not vegetarian anymore.
I used to be roommates with the Action Patrol singer. It didn't end well.
Yeah, when I ride thru that area now, I'm usually like "what the fuck happened?" It would suck to go to college there now. It's all college-ey and non-murderous and dank and dangerous seeming.
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