So as some of you know, I use to be a nightclub DJ. At one point, I was widely known as “the best bald, white, father-of-two rap DJ in the Twin Cities”, a distinction I wear – wore, anyway – with hard-earned pride.
Now, there’s not much about that part of my life that I miss (as I believe I’ve established). Certainly not most of the music – indeed, I remember buying a car back in 1990; the seller said “you know, it doesn’t have a radio” and I replied “Good”.
But there are a few bits and pieces of music I miss. Not many, but a few.
Gangster Rap is part of the noxious cocktail of debilitation that grips large swathes of urban culture in America (and by that I mean all urban culture; it’s not a racial code phrase), a cynical exploitive genre that enriches the very few by submerging the many in a toxic mental miasma. And for the last twenty years, cynicism aside, most of it’s just been really really bad music.
Now, there’s no accounting for taste – but I gotta say that after all these years I still like “NWA’s” “Straight Outta Compton”, even with all its yappy violence and teenagey misoginysm. Here’s the video, from 1989 (But first, let me remind you…
…that the language is not remotely safe for work):
Now, the point isn’t really to re-play that particular video…
…as to answer the question I think we all have on hearing it; “how would that sound as a brooding Seatle-coffee-shop folk cover?
(That’s Nina Gordon, formerly of college-pop darlings Veruca Salt, who always bugged me).
And, my favorite so far, this impeccably-edited version of Barney, Baby Bop and BJ:
Anyway – I’m going to pour out a forty, where “forty” means “Coffee”, and “pour out” means “Drink a cup of”, and get to work.
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