D CDs #470: And Could He Give Us More?

I know what you're thinking. Finally an ill-informed white boy dares to discuss a hip-hop revolution.

Wikipedia tells me LL Cool J's Radio represents the vanguard of the shift in dominance from old school hip-hop to new school, a fact I relate both to introduce what I want to talk about, and by way of warning the reader I know so little about hip-hop that I'm reduced to reading Wikipedia.

With my ignorance fully admitted, then, the thesis statement: Radio was the sound of the future. 

Even in so banal a position, I run into problems. Yes, it was astonishing, having listened to this, to learn it was released as early as 1985. But what does that actually mean? What I want to be true is that this represents how forward-thinking Radio is, that it encapsulated the sound of the early nineties almost a decade ahead of time. What I fear is true is that all I've picked up on is time-lag; the inevitable dissemination delay between block parties in Brooklyn, and the mix tapes of suburban North East England. 

When we get down to brass tacks and golden tracks, though, that's just noodling on how much Cool J (along with DJ Cut Creator and Rick Rubin) had one eye on the future, while the other focussed on the charts and communiques he used to conquer hip-hop. What matters is the victory.

There's perhaps some irony in the fact Cool J became the genre's emperor through democratising music. By showing you anyone could do it, he ensured everyone would do it, and some of them better than he did (I'll toss out here an entirely unsourced and uninformed opinion that this is why Charlie Juliet never hit so hard with an LP again). Radio is so minimalist it feels weird describing it with so long a word as "minimalist". It's just a dude with a microphone, a drum machine, and the occasional sample, clipped so short and tight they land like lightning strikes amid the storm of percussion. The pressure is fully on Cool J to be enough almost on his own, which he embraces in a statement of intent far more powerful then any number of balls-out braggadocio broadside ever could. Maybe that's why he gets the inevitable boast-track out of the way immediately, so he can move on to better things.

And those better things are genuinely great. It's absolutely the case that you just need to hand this guy a microphone and a tight beat and he can bring it. It's really hard to make something look this easy. Especially when you also make it funny. "You Can't Dance" (dips into ableist language aside) and "That's A Lie" in particular are notable for brilliantly tearing chunks out their targets, and doing so without ever reaching for a word you couldn't say in a Saturday morning cartoon. "Dear Yvette" is almost as fun, the admittedly uncomfortable sexual politics of its slut-shaming slightly sweetened by Cool J's own tales of heterosexual entanglement being oddly sweet in their hopeless romanticism.

If there's a problem here, it's in the timing. Assembling a meal with the smallest number of ingredients doesn't just force you to get everything you're adding absolutely right, it means no matter how well you prepare the food, people won't want to each all that much of it. Just about every track here starts brilliantly, and just about every track ends a verse after you want it to.  Sure, it's genuinely amazing that this formula works so repeatedly ten times in a row (we'll ignore "El Shabaz" here, for all that making a mid-disc palette cleanser the filthiest dish on offer is pretty fun). But I don't care how sick your rhymes are, sooner or later I'm going to stop caring how much you hate a guy whose dancing you dislike.

But then what am I recommending instead? Messing with an almost perfect formula? Adding more tracks for which, if they existed at all, there was presumably a good reason why they got left off originally? About the only advice I could offer, which stopped being timely forty years ago and never started being useful, was that these are two of the best EPs ever written, which maybe didn't need combining into a format where their genius is slightly blunted.

Still, even if I'm right (and ifs don't get much bigger), that wouldn't necessarily translate into Radio scoring a bigger win. And really, how much more total did its triumph need to be?

Eight tentacles.

Wee Jock

Wee Jock was a dog that could whistle 

And track legs like a heat-seeking missile 

So a ref he became 

Until he ruined a game 

Pissing on strikers while at Partick Thistle

Friday Dreadfleet: Bonesheads

Did me a Bone Hydra.

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.3.2 - "Anthem Part 2 " (Blink-182)

Things get weird after you make it big.

Blink-182's second album Dude Ranch didn't exactly fail to sell - it was nearing platinum status while the group recorded Enema Of The State. It was ...State that sent them stratospheric, though. By the time the trio were in the studio putting together their fourth album, ...State had reached quintuple platinum in the US alone. Them's crazy figures.

As is so often the case, the sudden colossal increase of attention, adoration, and account digits brought about - or perhaps here simply exacerbated - an identity crisis. Tom Delonge wanted to expand the group's sound beyond unusually polished, unusually puerile pop-punk. Mark Hoppus wanted to tap deeper into the vein.

The result was Take Off Your Pants And Jacket, a collection which felt for the first time like it was written by two distinct voices, rather than simply sung by them. You can hear the strain at the centre of the band, as DeLonge tries to escape the gravity well of the simplistic shtick that nevertheless made them famous, only to see Hoppus pull them back time and again.

Just seconds into "Anthem Part 2" the first song on Take Off... and released as a single in the summer of 2021, it becomes clear Tom had it right*. A glorious building rush of overlapping guitar parts sweeps us into a summary the American teenage nation. And OK, its really, really fucking stupid summary, but there's a universality in the banality. An awareness that people are listening, which people in particular will mistake directionless punk energy for guiding wisdom, and providing comfort in stating the bleedin' obvious: pretty much none of this is teenagers' fault. "If we're fucked up, you're to blame". A ludicrous statement when sung by a man twenty-five years old when he wrote it, but which holds real power when screamed out by a million teenagers, stagger-drunk on watery beer in the garden of the friend whose parents are out of town. This is political songwriting not as lecture, but as gift.

DeLonge directly addresses that fizzing mass of confused anger that's trapped within every teenager being forced to twist themselves to fit the bizarre, arbitrary rules society relies on to avoid having to actually fucking change anything. There are any number of smarter ways to summarise that all-consuming blaze than "Young and hostile, but not stupid", but there's not necessarily many better. This isn't a manifesto. It's an anthem. Teenagers don't need smarter slogans, because Gods know they're not losing the argument because the previous generations have more brains. What they need is power, and if anger is an energy, then music that channels anger is a power source.

For one glorious summer, before two men fell out and two towers went down, Blink were a battery for a generation. Not bad for the dudes who gave us "Dick Lips".

B-side: I couldn't find any particularly interesting versions of this song, so instead I present the second piece of evidence which conclusively proves Tom the victor in the 2001 Creative Visions war that almost tore the band apart. Because Jesus Christ, Mr Hoppus. The fuck you call this?

Friday 40K: Heating Up

Done two of 'em now innit.

I think I'm proud of these? Broadly speaking. Keep trying not to notice the bone armour is a slightly different shade on each of them. Stupid drybrushing.

Friday Talisman: My Spy

 

Did myself a Talisman spy, lads. Mine's a bit more colourful than the official art - I figured being extremely dressed up and all in black wasn't actually all that subtle. Just feels too try-hard, you know? Like, you've brought along your lorgnettes, mate. You ain't blendin' in to shit.

Distance Learning

Shall we do a little autopsy on a ghost story?

Spoilers for "73 Yards" below the fold.