Tangled Up in the Retards.
I'm afraid it's true. For every up, there's a down, and for every Alice In Chains, there's a Fiona Apple.
Tonight (and much of Friday) it was about slogging through the Retards. I'm sorry to report that it was not always super-fun. Maybe it was that awkward break that comes from Friday night to Monday morning which always disrupts the flow of the blitz (I do most of my blitzing during the week, when I do the bulk of my driving. On the weekend, it's all about the White Saturn and the Teddy Bear Picnic.) Or maybe it was the schitzo alphabetical nature of the Retards themselves.
At any rate, it wasn't until the Funky Retards (and you must copyright that title, by the way) that I actually become...Christ, can I use the word...bored? And in a CD that grabs the word funky to describe itself? Specifically, it was somewhere between Cypress Hill and en Vogue when I realized (or worse, felt) that the music was tiring me out. It was something I'd heard a million times. It was played out. I was over-saturated. I considered flipping on the talk radio.
[Tangent. By the way, this is the very reason that I've proposed the radical 10-15 year time capsule on 90% of my music collection. Like batteries, these tunes are in bad need of a recharge and I'm concerned that my playing and playing and overplaying them in the last 10-20 years has burned them out entirely for me. Boredom is not a word I want to bring into my music collection, but there you have it. It's already there. It's my hope that by burying and re-discovering most of my favourite music in a decade's spell will come with old memories and new flavours that I missed or can't enjoy this time around. The Retard CDs summed the importance of that experience for me, but damn quick, Skippy!]
Now, before I get to the saving grace - and the good news is that there was one - I want to take a minute to kick MC Hammer hard in the balls. I have to confess that the MC Hammer triple play of 2 Legit 2 Quit, Can't Touch This and Pray might be the lowest point that a blitz can reach for me. I'm all about the guilty pleasures. Let me re-iterate: I'm aaaaaaaallllll about the guilty pleasures. But I've never tagged those three songs back-to-back before and the cumulative power of their drone was enough to make me consider my options: finish the CD or turn the car into the guard rail. Seriously, I was dying. In the meantime, I had a bit of time to tug at the formulas. Here's what I found:
2 Legit 2 Quit - This song, for me, might be the single, best, most important and most improbable example of why the early-90's are the worst years in pop music. The song has everything bad about 90's pop music. Everything in one single radio-friendly song! It's as though Hammer was scrolling through his catalogue of bad-pop/rap devices and checked the box next to order all. You've got the Rosie-Gaines-ish back up singer howling away a-la C+C Music Factory throughout the song, hollering nothing clear at all. You've got the tough guys (who I imagine are in the tight C+C tank tops also) chanting out the chorus like it's a battle cry before a football game. You've got the orchestral smacks, overused to the point that they become like musical bitch slaps. And you've got repetition. You've got repetition. You've got repetition. Have you ever paid attention to how long this songs goes and goes and goes? (In the spirit of total and 100% disclosure, I do want to let you know that I practiced and perfected my 2 Legit hand signs in the time it took to listen.)
Can't Touch This - The perfect cheese-is-good song in any other context, but sandwiched between these two winners, it's just another jab in the thigh when you've already got a charlie-horse. Here's what made me laugh this time around. When MC Hammer gets to the break-down ("break it down!") the song doesn't, and please correct me if I'm wrong, break it down at all. In fact, I believe this is called a bridge. And to make the experience even more meaningless, Hammer goes back to this device FOUR times before the end of the song. I never realized it happened that many times but you count it out - four (4X) times - break-it-down (aka bridge), return to chorus, break-it-down (aka bridge), return to chorus, break-it-down (aka bridge - this time too lazy to shout out the "break it down!"), return to chorus, break-it-down (aka bridge), fade out. Really. The structure on this bad boy is a marvel of modern music.
Pray - Now here's a song I didn't even bother to include in my 90's collection because I didn't like it, I didn't want it and it never even appealed to me in a funny way. I didn't even know that it sampled When Doves Cry until tonight, and I think Prince should sue. Because by adding the bass line back to When Doves Cry, Hammer has dumbly demonstrated exactly why Prince stripped it out to begin with: it makes the song average (well, maybe that's overstating the case a bit - it's not quite average, but certainly not one of the best songs of all-time!)
So here's the good part. It was Shaq who got me home. Shaq!?! Of all 90's basketball-acting-rapping triple-threats, it was the Shaq-Attack who brought me out of the dumps! It's been a long time since I played call-and-answer with the whole "do you want me to shoot it?" number? And I don't think I've heard him trying to connect with Def Jeff since you owned this CD. It was a great throw-back and a totally great reason why these CDs work after you let them get dusty. I don't know where I was in nineteen-ninety-Shaq, but I went back there tonight.
Tonight (and much of Friday) it was about slogging through the Retards. I'm sorry to report that it was not always super-fun. Maybe it was that awkward break that comes from Friday night to Monday morning which always disrupts the flow of the blitz (I do most of my blitzing during the week, when I do the bulk of my driving. On the weekend, it's all about the White Saturn and the Teddy Bear Picnic.) Or maybe it was the schitzo alphabetical nature of the Retards themselves.
At any rate, it wasn't until the Funky Retards (and you must copyright that title, by the way) that I actually become...Christ, can I use the word...bored? And in a CD that grabs the word funky to describe itself? Specifically, it was somewhere between Cypress Hill and en Vogue when I realized (or worse, felt) that the music was tiring me out. It was something I'd heard a million times. It was played out. I was over-saturated. I considered flipping on the talk radio.
[Tangent. By the way, this is the very reason that I've proposed the radical 10-15 year time capsule on 90% of my music collection. Like batteries, these tunes are in bad need of a recharge and I'm concerned that my playing and playing and overplaying them in the last 10-20 years has burned them out entirely for me. Boredom is not a word I want to bring into my music collection, but there you have it. It's already there. It's my hope that by burying and re-discovering most of my favourite music in a decade's spell will come with old memories and new flavours that I missed or can't enjoy this time around. The Retard CDs summed the importance of that experience for me, but damn quick, Skippy!]
Now, before I get to the saving grace - and the good news is that there was one - I want to take a minute to kick MC Hammer hard in the balls. I have to confess that the MC Hammer triple play of 2 Legit 2 Quit, Can't Touch This and Pray might be the lowest point that a blitz can reach for me. I'm all about the guilty pleasures. Let me re-iterate: I'm aaaaaaaallllll about the guilty pleasures. But I've never tagged those three songs back-to-back before and the cumulative power of their drone was enough to make me consider my options: finish the CD or turn the car into the guard rail. Seriously, I was dying. In the meantime, I had a bit of time to tug at the formulas. Here's what I found:
2 Legit 2 Quit - This song, for me, might be the single, best, most important and most improbable example of why the early-90's are the worst years in pop music. The song has everything bad about 90's pop music. Everything in one single radio-friendly song! It's as though Hammer was scrolling through his catalogue of bad-pop/rap devices and checked the box next to order all. You've got the Rosie-Gaines-ish back up singer howling away a-la C+C Music Factory throughout the song, hollering nothing clear at all. You've got the tough guys (who I imagine are in the tight C+C tank tops also) chanting out the chorus like it's a battle cry before a football game. You've got the orchestral smacks, overused to the point that they become like musical bitch slaps. And you've got repetition. You've got repetition. You've got repetition. Have you ever paid attention to how long this songs goes and goes and goes? (In the spirit of total and 100% disclosure, I do want to let you know that I practiced and perfected my 2 Legit hand signs in the time it took to listen.)
Can't Touch This - The perfect cheese-is-good song in any other context, but sandwiched between these two winners, it's just another jab in the thigh when you've already got a charlie-horse. Here's what made me laugh this time around. When MC Hammer gets to the break-down ("break it down!") the song doesn't, and please correct me if I'm wrong, break it down at all. In fact, I believe this is called a bridge. And to make the experience even more meaningless, Hammer goes back to this device FOUR times before the end of the song. I never realized it happened that many times but you count it out - four (4X) times - break-it-down (aka bridge), return to chorus, break-it-down (aka bridge), return to chorus, break-it-down (aka bridge - this time too lazy to shout out the "break it down!"), return to chorus, break-it-down (aka bridge), fade out. Really. The structure on this bad boy is a marvel of modern music.
Pray - Now here's a song I didn't even bother to include in my 90's collection because I didn't like it, I didn't want it and it never even appealed to me in a funny way. I didn't even know that it sampled When Doves Cry until tonight, and I think Prince should sue. Because by adding the bass line back to When Doves Cry, Hammer has dumbly demonstrated exactly why Prince stripped it out to begin with: it makes the song average (well, maybe that's overstating the case a bit - it's not quite average, but certainly not one of the best songs of all-time!)
So here's the good part. It was Shaq who got me home. Shaq!?! Of all 90's basketball-acting-rapping triple-threats, it was the Shaq-Attack who brought me out of the dumps! It's been a long time since I played call-and-answer with the whole "do you want me to shoot it?" number? And I don't think I've heard him trying to connect with Def Jeff since you owned this CD. It was a great throw-back and a totally great reason why these CDs work after you let them get dusty. I don't know where I was in nineteen-ninety-Shaq, but I went back there tonight.
posted by J. at 7:38 PM
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