(1992, Capitol Records)
I ain't gonna front... back in the day when the Cypress Hill/House of Pain/Beastie Boys connection was made through the drug-induced hallucinatory doowop boom bap beatlosophy of DJ Muggs, I was 100% down. I had my stocking hat pulled down low on my eyebrows, even in the summer time, bro. Cypress Hill pretty much had just blown the fuck up completely, and wasn't yet a cartoon live action animation of itself ("OF ITSELF!" would be what Sen Dogg yells in your head right there). And even though the skinheads had pretty heavily embraced House of Pain and every motherfucker in Richmond was drinking either 22 oz. Hornets or the little stubby Mickey's bottles and throwing them through the windows of the abandoned factory across the street from their shitty assed apartment back then, Everlast hadn't hated upon DJ Quik and killed himself off into a folk sing-rapper EZ listening mainstay yet. And even the Beastie Boys still seemed relevant. I am a contrarian ass fucker, and hate many things for no explainable reason, other than I know something turned from fresh to sour, and often times that has as much to do with the real life chump-mans who cross my little circles across the surface of the earth ball as it does the musical artists themselves, although I stand by the belief that you get the type of fans you probably deserve. And Check Your Head was the last Beastie Boys CD I accept as acceptable... everything after that was a little too corny for my tastes. This might be partially attributable to me going to a party up in northern Virginia where a bunch of soulless suburban kids, all my age, were hanging out and kept bumping Beasties and gave me my first taste of Rage Against the Machine, which I will forever associate with a completely impotent and theatrical form of affluent revolution play to make one feel better about their inherited position of comfort amongst human life on this planet. There's not a real fucking ounce of threat to anything in Rage Against the Machine, and it's usually preaching to the converted. I would bet out of the 25 faux-revolutionaries bumping that shit that night at that gay assed party, at least 90% of them rocked Obama bumper stickers on some sort of unblemished vehicle last fall, and at least half of them shop at Whole Foods. Or fuck, if you count Trader Joe's lightweight Whole Foods vibe, I bet 90% of them hit one or the other, or both. Change through consumption, where you buy into altering the landscape, literally, instead of actually getting your hands dirty, or better yet, bloody. Organic, boneless chicken breasts are kosher, because there's nothing dirty about that at all, right?
Anyways, I was still into the Beasties, and at this point me and Brown still made the walk down to downtown Broad Street Willie's (R.I.P.), and 12-inch singles still offered unreleased remixes or bonus tracks instead of the standard Clean/Street/Instrumental with an occasional instrumental it went to before producers got a big head about their beats and reduced it to just Clean/Street singles with not a fucking thing of extra value. And the "So What'cha Want" single has great extras, like that Biz Markie song from Check Your Head, plus him doing some retarded Biz freestyle on another track. But the real deal Holyfield on this single is the Muggs remix, before Muggs got too hung up on his "signature" sound (which was before he got too hung up on his alleged "mash-up" ingeniuty) of the nerve-plucked horn blasts. The remix he does of "So What'cha Want" throbs in your brain like a good four-paneled hit of acid with just the right amount of strychnine mixed in to keep you feeling achy in your joints and extra restless until a few meandering hours after the effects of the high had maxed out. (Fuck it, take another, make a weekend of it bro.) And then at the end, after the Beasties have their fuzzed out tracks transplanted on top of this new brain-plucking beat, in comes B-Real aggro stoner with a clothespin on his nose style, crystal clear, kicking a blast of a verse that really just makes it one of the great remixes of forever. I can still play that shit at a party, and being I know a lot of white ass people who dabble but don't dip into the hip hop, they'll recognize the lyrics from the Beastie Boys, and enjoy the psychedelicate beat behind it, and then when B-Real comes in, folks are like, "Man, what is this? This is awesome?" And then some dude with dreadlocks will be like, "Yeah, I remember this. This is awesome." And he'll be full of shit, like most white dudes with dreadlocks are, which is why I don't have them anymore, because it lead to too many long conversations with people I didn't respect even briefly, and too many "yeah whatever" eyes from a few folks I would've liked to kick it with, except not really at the same time. I kick it in the camper, a solitary stick figure, a hobo with a home, which could be shortened to homebo, which is oddly close enough to homo, which yeah... a white guy with a blog talking long-winded shit about music into the tremendous chasm of 2009 attention span.
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