In My Changer: The High School Radio Nostalgia Mix

Midway through my junior year of high school, I was still listening exclusively to classical music and old Monty Python tapes. There had been a time in my life when I had listened to the local hip-hop stations, because that was what all my friends in the neighborhood listened to. I cut myself off from hip-hop, though, when someone I thought was cool in the gifted program at my junior high school told me that I shouldn’t listen to hip-hop, being white as I was, and instead should embrace rock. Showing what would prove during the rest of my adolescence to be an innate ability to find the worst possible option, I neither embraced rock nor kept on with hip-hop (save the purchase of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” single), retreating into the extreme cerebrality and obscurity of classical.

I fell back in with hip-hop for the classic reason: I attended special ed for a year and a half. The county-mandated door-to-door short-bus service entailed a very long ride, which in turn featured the sounds of WPGC 95.5, Washington’s #1 for hip-hop and R&B. The mornings, in particular, boasted Donnie Simpson, a fine American whose radio show burst with good humor, entertaining idiosyncrasies, mostly lighthearted discussion of the issues of the day, and (especially) local hits. (Donnie could have gone national long ago, but negotiations have always broken down over his insistence on playing the songs that are popular in D.C. rather than the genericized national playlist demanded of other syndicatees.) Listening to the songs over and over again, I was surprised to discover that I thought some of them were really cool.

So when I began driving, I also began listening to PGC in earnest. (Then as now, I rarely listened to radio at home - when you’re in the car, you can easily change the station when something idiotic comes on, whereas at home you are rarely so close to the receiver or the remote.) Nothing quite caught my ear for a little bit, but one day I heard Busta Rhymes’ first single as a solo artist - “WOO-HAH!! Got You All In Check.” Its wackiness and rubbery beat meant that I was officially hooked.

The songs on this playlist are my favorites from January 1995 to about September 1996, and then again from June 1997 through April 1998. (In September 1997, I quit college and began living with my parents and using their car; in April 1998, I thought better of living with my parents and couldn’t afford a car, and thus began not listening to the radio again.) For many of these songs, I have a distinct memory of driving past a certain place as I listen to them; it’s just like Proust and the madeline, except this is way more funky. For my own certain and your possible amusement, I am going to document every single thing I think about all these songs below.

The mix fits two sides of a 90-minute tape.

Side A

Busta Rhymes f/Rampage the Last Boy Scout

“WOO-HAH!! Got You All In Check”

“Busta Rhymes up in the place, true indeed/Yes, I catch wreck and that’s word on my seed.” I had no idea what most of that meant (that’s how insulated I had been), but Busta’s delivery was irresistible, making “seed” into “see-duh” somehow, singsonging everything he possibly could, and rasping all the other words into submission. The verses to the song each explored the various possibilities of certain rhymes, the first being “-ede,” the second being “-ooze,” and the third being “-o.” Mostly, though, each line explored the various possibilities of enunciation, timbre, pointless yet zingy pop-culture references, and the fun of riding a fat, jazzy beat.

This was the second single I ever bought (after the aforementioned “Baby Got Back”), and the first cassette single - it was bought specifically to play over and over in the car. (Later I got a CD maxi-single with a bunch of cool Jay Dee remixes on it.) My infatuation with this song was well-known among my friends, to the point that one of my high-school buddies (I dunno if he wants his name on the Internet, since he’s probably now a highly respected lawyer or something) produced a rudimentary parody with some more lines based on those end rhymes, which I joined. (I still think of “When I play Deep Blue, yo, I must concede” when I hear the song.)

When I was in high school, I labored under the belief that my friends did not actually like me, and were in fact inviting me to parties and outings and such for some obscure and perhaps devious reasons. I believed this because I was mentally ill, and I knew that even at the time, but the belief was so strong that I was in its thrall almost all the time nonetheless. It occurs to me, thinking about it now, that the strongest possible refutation to this belief is the fact that my friends encouraged me to rap along with this song at one of the many graduation parties I attended, and in fact all seemed to find this extremely entertaining. You would really have had to like me to do that.

Ol’ Dirty Bastard

“Shimmy Shimmy Ya (Extended Radio Version)”

For a while, I thought these first two songs were by the same person. (All those rappers sound the same!) This notion quickly evaporated upon actual thought. I first realized what genius this song was while driving on Wayne Avenue going back to my parents’ house from some errand in downtown Silver Spring. I came home, sat down at the family upright, and found the piano notes the song was built on: repeated C’s with a dip down to B to provide variety. C CCC CCC CCC B C etc. It also had a deep thrumming bass and nasty, sloppy drums, providing a perfect soundscape for ODB’s impressionistic, sing-songy braggartry. (This was also the first song in which I was able to actually hear studio trickery; the echo around ODB’s singing voice, trying to get some degree of resonance into it as he purrs “Oh, baby, I like it raaaaaaaaaw!”, makes it sound like the song was recorded in Notre-Dame or something.)

ODB’s Return to the 36 Chambers was the second full-length rap album I bought, after Raekwon’s Only Built for Cuban Linx…. (It was recommended to me that I get down with the Wu.) I played the album with a female friend in the car, and she objected to the “rape motif.” I responded with the following retorts:

1) Look, I’m giving you a ride home, so deal with it.

2) We’re not even to the rape motif part yet.

RIP, ODB.

Questionmark Asylum

“Hey Lookaway”

My most vivid memory of this song is having just bought the cassette single at Wheaton Plaza’s then-Sam Goody and going to pick up my sister nearby somewhere off University. It was summer, and the heat was typically punishing; I didn’t have the AC on; I would sometimes leave it off and lower the windows when I just wanted to soak in my surroundings (literally!).

Questionmark Asylum was a local rap group that I realize now was extremely derivative of the Pharcyde in its rhyme stylee, and as far as I know this single never penetrated markets beyond D.C., though it blew up on PGC and WKYS (the PGC derivative/competitor). It is one of the saddest hits I’ve ever heard ascend the charts; it’s built on a pulsing yet resigned guitar riff, the tired chorused announcement “I’m hot” with an echo on the last word, and occasional detached cooing from an unidentified alto. The MCs take turns with more or less despairing lyrics that cling to the track like a sweat-soaked T-shirt to your torso: “Seventy-two is my date of birth/God’s gift to the earth and for all it’s worth/Seeing things prosper through so much pain/So much love I cried tears of blood/Take a stroke on my jaw, flick my phlegm to the wind/I’m inspired by a city that’s rotting from within/I see the fruits of my labor distributed by cabal.” This type of lyric style doesn’t normally propel ascents up charts, and I didn’t hear a hit as realistically bleak until Kanye West’s “All Fall Down” last year.

“Hey Lookaway” is a terrific song, but unfortunately it was so much better than everything else on their album (though “Got Dem Joints” was an OK song, the rest was a bit sillier and less lyrically distinguished) that they no longer exist. If they came out with another album, though, I’d buy it, just to see if they could make another song like this.

Fugees

“How Many Mics”

I’m sure I had heard the song before, but I remember one night driving home on Military Road (between Western Avenue and Connecticut Avenue) from voice lessons and just suddenly hanging on every word of this song and realizing how great it was. The incantation “Pick up your microphone” at the beginning opens it perfectly, the close-interval minor-key loop stands up easily to its endless repetitions, and each of the Fugee MCs delivers a biting rhyme. Because Lauryn was the best, she delivers the best one: “Woo child, you’re puerile/Brain waves are sterile/You can’t create, you just wait to take my tape.” Also the Fugees would say “’Bing!” whenever one of their number got off an exceptionally good line, which was awesome.

I never got this album when it came out; instead, I borrowed it from my sister. It was nice to be able to bond with my sister over music after I decided to be nice to her and become friends at the age of 15. That was a really good idea in general, of course.

The Notorious B.I.G.

“One More Chance/Stay With Me (Radio Edit)”

A deep jazzy remix of this fine song, featuring Total cooing over a beat driven by a cold, sad piano loop that would later be reused by Ashanti for her hit “Unfoolish.” The “One More Chance” on the album is full of graphic fuck talk rather than the hilarious euphemisms prevalent in this rethinking’s lyrics. Still, it doesn’t really matter what Biggie’s saying, as this is one of the few times when he was swallowed up completely by his beat; the song has a desperately sad air that completely contradicts its lyrics. This was on a cassette single with the other, much better remix of “One More Chance” until one of my “friends” “borrowed” and then never “returned” it. I should have probably expected this, since he was noted for his marijuana use and, on the occasions when I allowed him to give me a ride, showcased some of the scariest driving I’ve ever had the displeasure of experiencing. Fortunately, I was able to pick up a CD single of the thing many years later.

Biggie makes some contribution to six tracks of the 20 selected for maximal nostalgiability by me: primary on three, cameoing memorably on two, and singing the hook (but completely overshadowing everyone actually rhyming on the song) on one. I wonder whether Biggie would still be as much a force on the hip-hop scene now as he was in 1996 if he hadn’t been shot. My guess is yes, though Rakim (his equal as an MC) hasn’t done anything interesting in years, proving that it is possible to allow manifest skills to become obscure.

KRS-One

“MCs Act Like They Don’t Know”

The first DJ Premier beat I really paid attention to! “Damn, this beat is nice,” I thought as I made a left turn from Colesville Road (aka US Route 29) onto Sligo Creek Parkway. It also had KRS-One, who I did not know at the time as the mad educational genius of hip-hop, talking sternly about the fakeness and skill-lessnessof today’s MCs, always a controversial topic and one on which many rappers feel compelled to pontificate. The beat, with its deep, smooth bass and characteristic Primo dirty-piano ornaments, was the main attraction for me then, as it virtually demanded to be turned up so that one could more easily nod one’s head to it. Later, of course, I would discover the manifest pleasures of turning up other Primo beats as he became my favoritest producer ever.

This wasn’t on the radio too much, but it’s an awesome song and the very specific memory of hearing it persists, so it makes the mix.

Coolio

“Sumpin’ New”

One of the finer party songs of the 90s, “Sumpin’ New” is the one with the sampled hook you all know and love: “One, two, three, four/Get your woman on the floor/Gotta gotta get up and get down/Gotta gotta get up and get down.” As such, it was all over the radio. However, my specific memory of it (and the reason it is on the nostalgia mix) is not even auditory. During the last few days of high school, attendance at any specific class was pretty much optional, as long as you weren’t actually truanting. I spent one class period in IB Art with some of my more aesthetically inclined friends, and felt very uncomfortable; I thrived on predictability and knowing my surroundings, and the controlled chaos of the art room only intensified my out-of-place feeling. I looked down, trying not to meet any of the strangers’ eyes, and found that the desks themselves were covered with the predictable profusion of sketches and messages. My roaming eye finally found that one person, in small, deep-black, haphazardly capitalized letters, had transcribed the hook onto the desk in front of me. It was something small and familiar, and I latched onto it, as the music box in my brain played the entire song and then concentrated on various permutations of the hook for most of the rest of the period. And I didn’t have a panic attack.

2Pac and Dr. Dre

“California Love (Radio Edit)”

This song probably reached the greatest fame of any on this list and thus needs no advocacy from me, but I will say that it is one of the least loving songs I’ve ever heard with the word “love” in its title; it’s all drive, forward forward forward with implacably increasing intensity standing in for more conventional public displays of affection. Also “Diamonds shining/Looking like I robbed Liberace” is a great line.

Those of you who were clocking hip-hop at the time of this single’s popularity no doubt remember that the version on the 2Pac album from which this single was drawn lacked said beat. I wanted the radio beat so bad that I took the (for high school) amazingly resource-intensive step of spending $10 on the import CD single. This single also includes the instrumental versions of both the radio and album edits, which have given me much incompetent rhyming pleasure over the years.

Our senior class had the opportunity to take a trip to Eastern Europe if the members thereof ponied up thirteen hundred dollars or so. This trip was led by my favorite teacher in all of high school, Herr Richard Baxter, and so I eventually successfully begged for my parents to give it to me as an early graduation present. I proceeded to alternate between astonishing excitement and complete mental illness-driven misery for ten days. One of the funnier mental excursions I took was developing an insatiable crush on the beat to this song, to the point that I was watching European MTV in the wee hours of the morning with the fond hope that I might hear it. Alas, it came on after I went to sleep the first night we were there, in Hungary, and then never again on the trip, at least that I saw.

2Pac, Coolio, Busta and Big Punisher are tied for second-most songs in this mix with two each.

The Notorious B.I.G.

“Big Poppa”

Another masterful narrative of the playa life from Biggie Smalls. “A T-bone steak/Cheese, eggs, and Welch’s grape” is a great line, with the unexpected tang of the realistic detail that always saturates even Biggie’s most commercial raps. The beat is a straight and effective bite of the Isley Brothers’ “Between the Sheets.” I don’t have any especially tangy memories of this song, but it seemed to be on the radio all the damn time, and it was one that always put my hand on the volume knob to give it a little extra juice.

Blahzay Blahzay

“Danger”

One of the most wonderful one-hits of all time, from a pretty good and very underrated album. I talk about the merits of the single and the album at length here, at the bottom of the page. The casette single was originally released in the plainest possible wrapping: block black type on a white background, with a huge expanse of white space in the middle. Of course, I snapped it up for car play. At one point during the height of “Danger”’s popularity, WPGC played it, after which I decided I hadn’t had enough and popped in the cassette. When I popped it out, PGC had gone to commercial, so I turned to KYS, which had begun playing “Danger” about ten seconds earlier. That was a fun ten minutes. “Danger” and the last song on Side B are the only two songs on this mix that I think I could just listen to for hours on end. There’s something magical about a beat this nice and an MC this assured and authoritative, at least for me.

Side B

Big Punisher f/Joe

“Still Not a Player”

It was a sunny summer day and I was piloting the station wagon in a turn from Old Georgetown Road onto northbound Rockville Pike when I realized that this song, which I’d been hearing over and over on the radio for weeks, was actually damn good. I had been snowed by the fact that it lacked deep bass of any kind and had Joe doing commercial-type R&B crooning on the hook; what I had been ignoring was Big Pun’s astonishing skills, with a breath control and mastery of internal rhyme rarely matched by any other MCs, and the addictive nature of the piano loop that served as most of the percussion other than some random clicks. “Still Not a Player” was also the song that introduced the absurdly useful catchphrase “I’m not a player, I just crush a lot” to the national lexicon; on the other hand, this single line sustained about five years of Stuart Scott’s career, so it can’t be counted as an unmitigated bonus either.

Lil’ Kim f/Lil’ Cease and the Notorious B.I.G.

“Crush on You”

There was some astonishingly subtle production going on at Bad Boy’s mid-90s hit factory in among the relentless beat-jackings, as in this song, whose presence in my consciousness dates from a trip back from the Flower Avenue Giant. All it has are chords that burble up from the bass in repeated pairs, starting on and then gradually circling back to I. At one point, when a V chord comes in, there’s an additional ornament above to usher the progression along. It doesn’t grab your attention until you figure out how intensely pleasurable it is to bump it in your ride. (Similar things could be said about Junior M.A.F.I.A.’s “Get Money,” another song with Kim and Biggie that almost made this mix. “Player’s Anthem” was less seriously considered.) The lyrics are throwaway except for Kim’s line “Shall I proceed?” as answered by a chorus: “Yes indeed!” You may remember this line from Nelly’s “Flap Ya Wings,” which engagingly bit it. But the song is dominated by Biggie’s hook: “I know you seen me on the video/I know you heard me on the radio/But you still don’t pay me no attention…” etc. Those first two lines are each answered with the word “True” from Kim’s foul mouth, and form a couplet to which I make references constantly. I mean constantly.

E-40 and Suga T

“Sprinkle Me”

“This is an odd song,” Spam-O-Maticker Nate Vaughan once told me after I had once again bumped the cassette single of it with him in the car, and I don’t disagree. It begins with an enormous burp, for example, and the carefree sway of the beat belies the aggressiveness of some of the lines. But the undeniable chemistry of Suga T and E-40 gives a golden glow to the entire song, and E-40’s renowned verbal inventiveness and elastic flow are well-complemented by Suga’s more straightforward boasts. Just as important for car listening, you can nod your head endlessly to it.

The Notorious B.I.G. and Total

“Can’t You See”

Another fine Bad Boy production, as Puffy extracted the murkiest chords from James Brown’s “The Payback” and piled them on top of each other to create a humid, darkly colored track that accommodates both Biggie’s unhurried playa mission statement and Total’s swooning desperation. It’s the perfect track to bump on a D.C. summer day; it saturates the air as much as the water vapor around here does, and gentlemen and ladies dig it with equal enthusiasm.

2Pac

“Keep Ya Head Up”

In 2Pac’s multiple-personality canon, this was one of the tracks where he showed respect to women; I have characterized this dichotomy in the past as the “keep your head up except when you’re performing fellatio on me” dilemma, although I used slightly spicier vocabulary. A Marvin Gaye vocal provides the hook (“Oooh, child, things are gonna get easier” etc.), and R&B ornaments add a little extra soul to a beat based on two twangy, reverberant chords. 2Pac certainly sounds sincere in his woman-appreciating — “To all the laides having babies on they own/I know it’s kinda rough and you’re feeling alone…Cause I think we can make it — in fact, I’m sure/And if you fall, stand tall and come back for more.” And somehow I managed to twist this ode to impoverished, struggling black women into a personal anthem to encourage my own survival.

Attentive readers have probably determined by now that, at least in terms of material circumstances, my adolescence was pretty damn cushy, and they are no doubt wondering how the hell this could happen. Really attentive readers have realized that any kind of playa narrative is far beyond my ken, since I am almost always shy and unassertive around women to whom I am attracted, and are doubtless wondering about some of the rest of the songs on this list and how I can possibly have been so into them.

My struggle in high school was not with my material circumstances or with women who wouldn’t give it up; it was with mental illness. When the panic attacks would descend upon me, or when I would suddenly tense up in a social situation, or when I would wake up in a bleak mood for no obvious reason, I felt (among other things) an awful loss of control, like I was being swept away by a sudden river away from my intended destination and was going to wash up hard on some inhospitable shore. I have now learned how to at least get up out of the stream pretty quickly and not to travel too far, although the panic will always be with me.

What rhyming along with and nodding my head to the bragging and boasting (whether regarding the potential for violence or the certainty of copulation) allowed me to do was verbally assume a persona that had absolute control. Rappers, after all, rarely let down that kind of guard; they talk about how life is hard sometimes, but it’s in the standard MC contract that a rapper always be able to handle his or her business. The more I could latch onto some simulacrum of control when I went about my daily business, the more I could pretend to deal with it with a confidence I didn’t really feel. And one good way to gain confidence is to pretend you have some and see what happens, at least for as long as you can stand to pretend. Hip-hop helps me do that, in a way most classical music can’t, and I am grateful for its help.

So when 2Pac rhymed that his women could transcend their material circumstances and get respect and success in the world for themselves and their children, it was natural for me to transmute that somehow into transcending my mental illness and getting a foothold in the world that I wasn’t going to give up. Which I now have done. So thanks for that, too.

Craig Mack f/the Notorious B.I.G., Rampage, LL Cool J and Busta Rhymes

“Flava in Your Ear (Dirty Remix)”

Back to the jams! This one predates high school by a little bit, but I first heard it while driving back from my late-nite data entry job at Aspen Systems in Rockville during the summer after high school, so who cares. Yet another Biggie cameo provides the most memorable rhyming moment in the song, with a punchline-to-word ratio unsurpassed in his literature (“[Racial slur]s is mad, I get more butt than ashtrays/Fuck a fairway, I get mine the fast way”). Easy Mo Bee provides a track with two stark chords, I-V, that bump the whole thing along; Craig Mack provides the hook, which has something to do with kicking brand-new flava in your ear. Also, it’s a given that all posse cuts that end with Busta are classics (cf. “Scenario”), especially when he goes wild on the beat like he does on this one.

The Beatnuts f/Big Punisher and Cuban Link

“Off the Books”

This one I first heard when turning off Sligo Creek Parkway onto Colesville Road on the way to said data-entry wonderland. It’s funny because I didn’t know the name of the song for a long time, and figured out what it was by the roundabout method of buying the Beatnuts’ next album and hearing a sample of the production on that album. Big Pun shines on the beat, but the whole thing is a hookless rush to the final proclamation “It’s off the hook this year/Making mad money off the books this year” over a spanking drum track and two downward flutters of a flute that become incredibly catchy upon repetition. The Beatnuts have always been in the forefront of using flutes on hip-hop tracks, and I think it is safe to say that this will be the unexcelled peak of such use for a long time. The flutes echoed in my head for a long time until I actually bought the album, and then I played this song about 15 consecutive times.

Coolio

“Too Hot”

Coolio’s safe-sex anthem, twisting Kool and the Gang’s super-smooth same-titled romance into a warning against HIV et alia. Coolio’s relative moral seriousness always appealed to me, I have to say, and he found the perfect balance between it and the normal hip-hop rhetoric on this song. I bought this on a cassette single also, which disappointed aforementioned Spam-O-Maticker Nate Vaughan, who wondered why I had not bought “Gangsta’s Paradise” and its Gothic wall of string chords. I’ve always been more impressed by understatement than over-, and Coolio makes it convincing here. Plus this is just a nice beat to cruise to.

SWV

“Right Here”

An R&B song, right here! Ha ha! What’s even funnier than my ability to identify with thug-life songs is my ability to somehow extract romantic sympathies from love songs, when I have had almost no romantic love in my life at any point save one eight-month stretch. (We were together for 14 months, though!) This song, like all the SWV songs I ever heard, follows hip-hop templates precisely except that it has chicks singing rather than dudes rapping; Michael Jackson is enlisted for sample provisioning, and some DJ begins scratching when things threaten to get boring. And somehow the repeated insistence that “my love will be right here” from three women with pretty faces and voices is comforting even when you know it isn’t true.

The Notorious B.I.G.

“One More Chance (Hip-Hop Remix)”

My favorite hip-hop song ever recorded. There, I said it. Elsewhere (well, elsewhere on this site), I have described it as “Puffy's greatest work of genius: the ‘Hip-Hop Mix,’ built around a tangy six-note bassline (previously discovered by Moe Bee for a remix of Craig Mack's ‘Flava in Ya Ear’), some subtle vocal hits, and a hint of sonic dirt in the mix. Apparently this track played in the clubs over and over when it came out, no intervening songs, just ‘One More Chance’ dozens of times. I completely understand. ‘One More Chance’ in the hip-hop mix will forever live in my memory as the track that made me understand why it's fun to drive around at night during the summer, windows down, blasting music: there are very few finer feelings in the world than having your current favorite song on the radio, going wherever you want, and telling people by example what your favorite radio station is.”

I’m playing it over and over right now, and everything’s coming back to me.

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