Category Archives: Hip hop

Old Skool

Posted on by

Hadn’t heard Chaka Khan’s I Feel For You in years, and Melle Mel’s machine gun rap is still amazing, but does anyone even rap like that anymore? It’s feels more coke than kush, New York hyper instead of LA’s Snoop drawl. Makes me wish again that I hadn’t had to sell off my whole collection of Old Skool when it was all brand new skool, but we needed a new transmission. The buyer took everything but one scratched Paid In Full, everything. I wore out that scratched Paid In Full. Because fish/is my favorite dish dish dish dish dish… I remember before then the noisy parties every fucking weekend in the mid 80s back on Edgecliffe and me and Jon and Scott Drake fighting The Panther (aka Sam Hernandez though if he’s Sam I’m Phyllis) for the turntable and finally taking off the Stones and playing Run DMC and Kurtis Blow and Schooly D and Roxanne Roxanne and all the records answering it. It alienated all the Ramones obsessives in the house, though I suppose that was the point. Eventually, wasted, we drifted away from the turntable and it was Blitzkrieg Bop again. Old Skool when it was brand new skool.

But I digress.

Bobby Jimmy and the Critters

Posted on by

Bobby Jimmy and the Critters. That’s who did the tune I’ve been hearing a fragment of in my head for days. Apparently as you age your memory starts shedding random musical artifacts and they float about your skull like junk DNA for no reason at all. Before the internet you could ignore them. Now you google yourself mad trying to identify the source, wasting precious remaining hours. Bobby something, I kept thinking. I went through the alphabet. Bobby Ann? Bobby Bradford? Bobby Darin? Bobby Jimmy! Bobby Jimmy and the Critters. Now the chorus comes in on top of that incessant beat. We like, we like, we like Ugly Women. Oh man…I spent a whole week hearing a wordless We Like Ugly Women. And with that thought the trumpeter next door hits three flat notes, like a really fucked up Chinatown.