Category: The Lists

In this day and age, when bands and rights holders slap down YouTube videos just for the mere MENTION of their songs (just ask Rick Beato, if you don’t believe me), De La Soul’s “Three Feet High and Rising” would never have been made.

This is a music nerd’s album, made during the heyday of sampling in 1989. The sheer breadth and diversity of its samples are staggering, and to this day you can find the proprietors of nooks and crannies of the Internet who have painstakingly identified just about each one.

As far as I’m concerned, however, it’s unnecessary. I’m sure the samples, pulled from every stripe of jazz, funk, rock, and the occasional cartoon, were fine on their own, but in the hands of these hip-hop weirdos, they became something completely different. And the first time these shaggy rhythms hit the ears of this beat junkie, he couldn’t stop listening.

If I’m being honest, the music of “Three Feet High and Rising” is messy. It feels slapped together in unrefined pieces, and has a “sop sound” so distinctive its lead MC essentially backmasked the words and made it his name. However, don’t let me give you the impression that its messiness diminishes its greatness — oh, no.

“Change in Speak” sounds like it was recorded on a crappy tape player from a scratched up record with a cheap stylus, and is punctuated throughout with James Brown’s soulful “unh” as if to emphasize its nastiness. “Me Myself and I” sounds like someone is unsuccessfully beatboxing underneath the bass and snare, flinging spit everywhere. Here, the drums are way back in the mix. There, they’re featured out front. But the mess is funky, lived in and organic — as close to feeling “live” and “spontaneous” as a hip-hop group can be, I guess.

But these sloppy head snappers get down into your spine, and you can’t help but move. Whether they’re scratching their through the whiplash-inducing beat of “Jenifah Taught Me (Derwin’s Revenge)” or moseying through the slouchy “Potholes in My Lawn,” these beats take a powerful hold. While they do, Pos Dnous, Trugoy and Maseo lead you into a world of daisies and higher consciousness, where being an outcast is just dandy.

More than all of this, however, is the fact that the album is just hilarious, constructed around a “game show” with ridiculous contestants who are serious yet clueless. Jokes are inserted and revisited, innuendo abounds, and if at first you don’t understand their euphemisms and inside gags, don’t worry. After a few more listens you’ll get it and share it with your friends.

This was a rap album for the weird kids, where everybody was welcome. “Three Feet High and Rising” was the soundtrack for rap’s rejects, inviting you into their inner circle where it was pure, unadulterated fun.

I still bristle at the term “grunge.”

I don’t know why. I know it’s easier to talk about all these bands in terms of the large genre into which they (like it or not) reside, but I feel like it takes away from their distinctiveness.

Nirvana sounds nothing like Pearl Jam. And Soundgarden sounds nothing like either one of them. Where “Nevermind” is fast, aggressive, sarcastic and filled with catchy hooks, “Ten” is slower, more brooding, with more emotional weight (whether intended or achieved). “Badmotorfinger,” however, is loud and punishing, dripping with metal riffs and drowning in the bleak lyrical landscape of its existentially lost characters.

I know I’m straying from the central point with this little diatribe, but I really want Soundgarden to have their due. They are a singular band with a singular sound, and while that sound evolved over a depressingly short stretch of creative output, essentially it was melodic and blistering metal.

Kim Thayil’s guitars just buried you under mounds of drop D tuning while Chris Cornell’s vocals screeched and soared and crooned and smoldered over a bluesy melody. Matt Cameron — one of my favorite rock drummers of all time, just for the record — is perfectly comfortable with a punk rock feel, as on “Rusty Cage,” as he is with a driving, syncopated 7/8 time signature as on “Outshined.”

This is contemplative metal music for the kids who weren’t really into metal.

I was never a fan of Judas Priest. I had a brief affair with Iron Maiden and Motley Crue in middle school, but they weren’t really speaking to the things I cared about.

Soundgarden, however, was telling stories of dark characters with dark urges, or just talking about normal people who were wrestling with life, love and their existence in an apparently uncaring universe — all the things a directionless college student cares about.

And on top of all that, it just ROCKED.

Soundgarden would go on to make more popular, more accessible albums, but “Badmotorfinger,” to me, is still their best.

I fell in love with hip-hop in middle school. “Planet Rock” had been a staple at the skating rink, but my friend Richie was the first person to turn me onto “Jam On It” by Newcleus, which kind of blew my mind at the time. If I remember correctly, he wanted to go walk around the neighborhood, but I just wanted to hear that song again.

https://youtu.be/zEmg5GaAHbk

I don’t know what it was about really funky beats back then, but man, they just grabbed me by the throat in a way that NOTHING else could. “Stick ‘Em” by the Fat Boys, or even better — “Roxanne Roxanne” by UTFO — with that really sparse but heavy bass and snare just yanked on my ears and demanded a listen…goosebumps on goosebumps.

Probably comes as no surprise that I became a drummer during that time. I didn’t know what a drum machine was, but I spent HOURS on my set trying to GROOVE like that. LL Cool J, RUN DMC, Eric B. and Rakim, DJ Kool, Rob Base — those beats were just ETCHED into my BRAIN.

But then in ’91, the Tribe flipped the script. I was in my buddy Andrew’s car when I first heard “Scenario.” That bass and organ intro sounded ominous — a jazz song for the road? I had no idea what was coming.

And then the beat dropped.

Good Lord that beat dropped and I honestly didn’t know what to do with myself. I wanted to bob my head and dance and jump out of the car and just go crazy. It was PURE ELATION. And then the rhymes! Phife had this sort of high, gruff voice, while Q-Tip came with this smooth, nasally thing that almost sounded fake. Then Busta Rhymes comes in sounding like some kind of tribal warrior thumping his chest — “RAWR RAWR LIKE A DUNGEON DRAGON!” I was absolutely hooked for life.

Little did I know what other sonic wonders awaited me on that album. “Excursions” with it’s simple upright bass and the pop of that snare; “Buggin’ Out” with Phife’s “Yo!” bringing in this head-snapping beat, over which he raps, “Microphone check, one two, what is this? The five-foot assassin with the roughneck business;” “Check the Rhime” with those crazy horns; “The Infamous Date Rape,” urging young men to get permission before trying to be intimate (not a trending theme in rap songs at the time); and then “Scenario,” which frankly just SLAPS so hard to this very day.

“The Low End Theory” also really introduced me to the wonder of jazz and funk, genres into which I’ve immersed myself for years and years since. It’s the music I turn to when I just want to have fun, feel free and creative, and dance like nobody in the world is watching.

And I honestly can’t think of an album with better beats and samples than this one. Period.

I didn’t become a devotee of R.E.M. until after my sophomore year of high school in 1989.

They’d released their fifth record, “Document,” a couple of years before that. It was the album that gave them their first mainstream hit, “The One I Love,” but also had those offbeat singalong songs, like “Strange” and “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” My best friend got a car that year, and it was the tape that fired up every time we hit the road.

“Reckoning,” however, was the album that got under my skin — the record I listened to alone in my room. It was the record that lured me into obsession — the one that made me go digging for more, reading interviews, borrowing copies of “Athens, Georgia Inside/Out” and recording every video that came on MTV so I could watch Michael Stipe sing, watch Peter Buck pick the strings like a country artist, watch Bill Berry thunder away, and marvel at the beautiful harmonies of Mike Mills, who looked like he’d joined the band right out of FFA.

If “Document” was the fun, offbeat record, “Reckoning” was the more contemplative one. Don’t get me wrong, “(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville” is as jangly and fun as anything the band ever wrote, but songs like “7 Chinese Bros.,” “Time After Time (Annelise),” and “Camera” are haunting, with lead singer Michael Stipe sounding as if he’s mourning a lost love or maybe begging them to come back. In “So. Central Rain,” the wailing refrain “I’m sorry!” runs through the entire song, and absolutely enchanted me.

I honestly didn’t know what to do with this fusion of country, new wave, rock with often incomprehensible lyrics, and the term “alternative” was only beginning to be slapped on bands and their music in order to differentiate them from the mainstream.

I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it had infected me in a life-altering way. Never again would I be content with the songs on the radio. My songs needed to be a little weird, and I was perfectly okay with that.