When I was in the college, I did a 12-page paper on this very song, for a linguistics class, breaking the shit down to a nerdgasmic compound. At the time that was crazy clever, but what with the internet, that's been lost. I'm not sure how you'd be clever nowadays with everything meta times twelve all over the place. But I've always dug this song immensely - actually have the 12-inch single for I think "Dr. Bombay" but to be honest, I don't even know, because all I ever played off the single was "Eye Examination" proving that B-side not only won again but made A-side obsolete in my brain.
I went to college at VCU, which is in the news for basketball glory. Kids filled the streets at campus when they won their Final Four game last weekend, except a lot of campus is like a couple blocks over from where I remember, because they've expanded like fuck, trying to chase off the negro crimelords of Jackson Ward, and expand the big industry of higher education to revitalize the Broad Street corridor around the campus there. Used to be a place called Ivory's where people got shot every weekend. Like seriously, every weekend. Dude opened up with a machine gun one night, and abandoned his hot pink Beamer right on Broad Street. I always wondered if he just ran off or got in someone else's car or what. Seems a big waste of a pimped out Beamer. Ivory's is gone though, as is the Hardee's and the old strip club that was the most decrepit concrete building ever, that got tore down while I was still in school there. Industry is the key to revitilization.
They showed a park there where the students were encouraged to celebrate, but none of them really filled the park, which was odd to me and my wife because when we went everybody hung out there, including the homeless. But the school took over the park - Monroe Park - and put benches with center armrests to keep people from sittin' sideways on them, and put a campus cop shop in the center gazebo-like building. I guess no one goes there anymore, like it's a red zone of unlounging and the kids preferred to fill the asphalt going around it. That park is where I first met my wife. I was high on acid. That's college.
My linguistics paper on Del's B-side song that won again, I really was proud of it, more so than most things I did in college. I still have the word processor I wrote it on, but the thing is broke, and you can't use those disks from one to the other without them being reformatted, but I still have a box of those disks from that word processor. I have in that box about 80 pages on a novel I wrote about some coked out ambulance EMT guy who was stealing tattooed skins off of dead people, and there was this background uprising going on where naked people with torches - like hundreds of them - would just storm through at times like a tsunami wave of feral humanity. The novel really sucked, and I got sick of the main character, and didn't want to hang out with him anymore. I wish I could see what he's been up to, locked up in those obsolete word processor disks all these years. I wonder if he ever finished making his wall-hanging?
STEAL "Eye Examination"
NEXT: You can run but you can never hide, not even when you are concealed!
3 comments:
Man, I remembers shortly after we met and you invited me to your house for a party and I said a couple bars from this song asking if you ever heard it as I only ever had it on a tape I recorded from 103.3 WPRB's superb Raw Deal rap show in the 90's. And I was shocked when you said not only had you heard it, but loved it and had it on wax! I knew then that you were a down ass whiteboy and we could be friends. Those were the days, the early days of the internets when you couldn't just find everything and download it listen to it and forget about in .000000023 seconths. You still had to communicate with people in thought speak not thought type.
was that the night with the gangsta rapper kid from Baltimore that did the "baltimore"/"don't start a war" thing like 79 times? good times man.
"I never had real friends til now, I never had to steal ends 'cause that's foul"
Haaha I think that happened later, that kid from B-More was funny though. He also may have mentioned his 9mm 2 or 300 times. I bet he left with a bigger respect for backyard country Hip-hop shenanigans. But we did play that record that night also.
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