Monday, March 19, 2012

Miami Mediocrity



It's weird to discover stuff that you thought was absolutely hilarious as a kid is, well, kinda annoying in a childish way when you get older. Case in point, 2 Live Crew's sophomore effort Move Somthin'. After catching the heavily edited "Do Wah Diddy" video on Yo MTV Raps! (ugh, I feel embarassed writing that - can I come across any more whitebread suburbanite???) I instantly shot down to the criminally overpriced corner record store and shelled out way too much for what I thought was the funniest, dirtiest, most insane rap album of all time until I got Eazy-Duz-It a year later and the world was set right again. Flash forward 25 years; I stumbled upon the CD in the dusty "used hip-hop" section at my local punk store and quickly shelled out 4 bucks for it. Wow, what an eye opener! For all the anticipation, I could not believe how amateur it was; at best it resembles a dirty Fat Boys album, at worst a sloppily sampled electro-rock abortion. I dunno, maybe I'm being too harsh. I mean it was 1987 and the TR808 ruled the hip hop world but, man, Move Somthin' is really fucking stupid. I can sorta see why my adolescent brain thought it was the shit but not surprised by the time As Nasty As They Wanna Be came out a couple years later I passed. Kind of a one-trick pony, I guess. Still, much props to Luke Skyywalker and the boyz for achieving what they did in the rap world and giving the Miami scene a voice - not to mention bringing worldwide attention to some significant First Amendment issues but that's for another post. Until then, pull out the Walkman and drop the bomb with your badself. Enjoy.


 
Currently watching: Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace 3-D
Currently listening to: See You Next Tuesday Parasite

2 comments:

Czar Nicholas said...

I have a copy of 'Nasty As They Wanna Be' on tape that one of my aunts gave to me. I used to drive around with one of my girlfriends back in the day and blast that shit as loud as possible because it was such a piece of shit. That said, I'm a huge Geto Boys fan. There's something about shitty 80s rap albums that appeals to me.

winston95 said...

Oh man, when that Def American Geto Boys album dropped I thought I had died and gone to heaven. My CD looks like I fucking played street hockey with it. Sadly, I think they shot their wad way too early, though I think there's still some salvageable stuff on We Can't Be Stopped and a couple of the (early) solo albums aren't too bad. Just seems the production at old Rap-A-Lot could never match up to what Rick Rubin could do. Too bad. And now Bushwick's a preacher and Willie D runs his own high-roller private security firm. Go figure.