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Nostalgia Rules: Early Nineties Rap Stars by Indie |
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I
am making a sweeping generalization here, but seriously.
Is there truly anybody out there who doesn’t remember the
hip-hop rap craze of the early nineties? Obviously if you were
only a baby at the time it rules you out, but teens of the 90's
unite. We had some mighty fine music way back then.
Remember... MC Hammer King
of the early nineties rap crews. His
baggy pants are legend, as is his running man dance.
“You Can’t Touch This” still will get me up on a dance
floor, no matter what. He
lost his cred a bit when he started singing about praying, although that
might have just been my Religious Studies teacher trying to make us
think Jesus was a bit trendy by busting out the Hammer “Pray” rap in
assembly one time. “The
Addam’s Family Groove” redeemed him, and he’ll always hold a
special place in my heart. Heavy
D & The Boys “Now
that we’ve found love, what are we gonna do, with it?
Ah, freak it up one time.”
Heavy D was the man. The
sight of him jiggling in time to his tune while the outlying regions of
his body would jiggle at entirely a different beat.
That used to freak me out dude. Tone
Loc Remembered
for his really deep Barry White-ish voice and his wicked cool rap
“Wild Thang”. I also
remember he provided the voice of this salamander/lizard thing in ‘Ferngully’,
and did a tune “If I’m gonna eat somebody, it might as well be
you...” but you didn’t necessarily need to know that.
Ahem. Kris
Kross Two
pre-pubescent boys who wore all their clothes backwards and
“Jump”-ed., and if I remember correctly they called themselves Mack
Daddy and Daddy Mack. They
lost it when their voices broke, but such is the downfall of many a kid
group. Kris
Kross are at the forefront of my mind because I remember two boys in my
class would insist on wearing their clothes backwards and would pogo on
the dance floor at school discos to this song, and ONLY THIS SONG. I’m not mentioning names, because they know who they are.
That’s shame enough. PM
Dawn “Set
Adrift On Memory Bliss” is about the only thing I remember from them,
but I remember they did a song sampling Spandau Ballet’s “True”
(was it this one?) and a lyric mentioning Christina Applegate.
The singer was chubby and had spiky pineapple style hair. Beats
International, feat. Lindy Layton I
am including this one, in remembrance of the fact that as a young
pre-teen, my friends and I (and hell, let’s face it, every kid in our
school) learned the rap in this song, and yelled it at the top of our
voices during bus trips. I
can still remember it (Or at least our version of it): “Jam
fly boss walk, jam nitty gritty, You’re
listening to the boy from the big bad city, This
is jam hot. This
is jam hot.” You
would then cross your arms, hug yourself, nod and hum the hummy bit from
the middle-8 of the song. They
just don’t make tunes like they used to. Vanilla
Ice I
heart Vanilla Ice. He is
king. “Ice, Ice Baby”
is still the greatest song in the universe and I’ll hear no different.
Especially beloved for his suck ass acting turn in the originally
titled Cool As Ice (which I still have on video, not that you needed to
know that), a story about a rich daddy’s girl falling for a spiky
haired rapper from the wrong side of the tracks.
Yes, the story’s the same one we’ve seen on Dirty Dancing,
and just about every John Hughes movie ever made, but screw it, it’s
Vanilla Ice dude. Vanilla’s
still around, with his squinty good looks, but he’s more Marilyn
Manson that Puff Daddy these days. Snow A
one hit wonder (hey, weren’t they all?) with a completely
unintelligible song about god only knows what.
All I remember about this guy was that he was white, from Canada
(which probably explains a lot about him) and somebody told me that
“Informer” was about a drugs bust and a body cavity search.
I’m gonna take their word for it, because I’ll be damned if I
can be bothered to do a lyric search for Snow.
You used to sing the “Informer” bit then hum until the final
“Licky boom boom down.” No, nobody knew what it meant then either, even those who
could decipher the rest of the lyrics. |
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© Indie |
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