Despite having a backlog of new
(to me) CDs to grok in their fullness, this weekend I went and bought four
more. As usual it was a mix of different
stuff, some seventies Neil Young (American Stars N’ Bars), the one Elton John
album I still wanted (Caribou), the one Nazareth album I still wanted (Rampant)
and my first ever New Pornographers album (the Challengers).
I’m looking forward to getting to
know all those albums but in terms of reviewing them, I’m happy to wait for the
dice gods to randomly select them for me. Here’s what they selected last.
Disc 596 is….All World
Artist: LL Cool J
Year of Release: 1996, but featuring
music from 1985 to 1995
What’s up with the Cover? The ever-popular “Giant
Head” cover. Proof that someone other than Gordon Lightfoot can do these. For a guy with ten years of hits under his
belt, LL Cool J looks surprisingly angry. Dude, life is good – despite that
crappy show you now star in.
How I Came To Know It: I really like the song “Mama Said Knock You Out” but I wasn’t
sure I loved LL Cool J enough to buy an album, even a best of. So I asked my Mom to buy me this album for
Christmas many years ago, and she did. Thanks, Mom!
How It Stacks Up: While cleverly not referenced in the title, this is
a best of; a compilation of music from LL Cool J’s first decade in the music
industry. Therefore, as per CD Odyssey
rules it can’t stack up. I do have an
actual album of his that came out later, but I’ll talk about that when I roll
it.
Rating: ‘best of’ albums don’t get rated. That would just make all the regular albums
feel bad.
While I was off getting a musical
education in first metal, and then Celtic folk music, LL Cool J was busy gettin’
busy becoming a founding father of the new musical style of rap, then taking
that genre in entirely new directions.
In 1985, metal-heads like me were
convinced this whole ‘rap thing’ was never going to go anywhere – who would
want to listen to some guy talking when he should be singing? Well, rap (and
later hip hop) went on to become one of the dominant forms of pop music, so the
joke was on me and all the other idiots that thought all these guys did was ‘talk.’
Rap is art, and LL Cool J is one of its great early artists.
Being a retrospective of his work,
“All World” shows how much LL’s music has changed over the years. His mid-eighties start features very
traditional rap songs like “I Can’t Live Without
My Radio” and “I Need a Beat”,
with stark beats that showcases the strength of LL Cool J’s phrasing.
I’m only beginning to understand
how to play the guitar, and was recently working on coming in and out of a song
on the right beat, and on the right side of that beat. It’s harder than it sounds, but LL Cool J’s
ability to do it is flawless, even while maintaining one of the smoothest flows
in rap.
Frequent readers of A Creative
Maelstrom will know how much I appreciate early rap, where the subject is
usually some variation of “I rap better than you.” LL Cool J is great at this,
and “All World” has a couple of great examples in 1987’s “I’m Bad” and 1989’s “Jack the
Ripper.” One of my favourite lines is from “I’m Bad”:
“My vocal’s exact like rack and pinion in a Jag
You try to brag you get your rhymes from a grab-bag
No good scavenger catfish vulture
My tongue's a chisel in this competition sculpture.”
Simultaneously comparing his raps
to precision automotive and an artist’s sculpture while basically saying his
opponents are bottom-feeding, rhyme-stealing scavengers.
My favourite of his in this genre
is “Mama Said Knock You Out.” It is an
obvious choice, but only because it is so demonstrably awesome. This song takes
all the rap prowess of earlier songs and adds a rock beat to the mix, while
never losing the funk. Quoting “Mama Said Knock You Out” is like
describing a painting – something gets lost in the translation. Suffice it to
say that over the last five years only one rap song has never been deleted from
my MP3 player, nor ever skipped when it came on, and this is it.
In fact, the fact that he is better
known overall for rap love ballads is a bit of a disappointment for me. Songs like “Around the Way Girl” and “I
Need Love” are good songs, but they have a pop sensibility that spawned a
lot of later radio friendly hip hop that is my least favourite aspects of this
genre. I don’t blame LL Cool J for taking the music in this way – it isn’t his
fault it got bad so quickly – but neither is it what I look for when I’m
listening to his music.
I prefer his love ballads to be tongue-in-cheek,
sexually playful and self-consciously inappropriate. The best examples of these
are “Big Ole Butt” about a
philanderer who can’t resist constantly cheating because each new girl has a
nicer booty than the last one. The song’s narrator holds a reprehensible
viewpoint, and singularly bad judgment, but it makes for a damn funny song. A
later effort, “Back Seat” about a
sexual encounter in a jeep is equally fun and ridiculous. No one can turn an
inappropriate comment playful like LL Cool J.
Examples include this from “Big
Ole Butt”:
“I kicked the bass like an NFL punter
And scoped the booty like a big game hunter”
And this from “Back Seat”:
“As I turn the corner, starin' in your cornea
you're gettin' hornier and hornier.”
Hearing this stuff you’d be sure
that LL Cool J couldn’t possibly get as much action as his music implies, but when
you look as good as he does with his shirt off, anything is possible.
LL Cool J may now be busy making
garbage network TV, but “All World” reminds me how important he was to an
entire musical genre, well before it was being accepted by the mainstream. On
that note, I did myself a disservice not noticing LL Cool J for the first ten
years of his career, and I’m glad to be making up for lost time. Despite how
much I enjoy “All World” I think I’ll branch out from the ‘best of’ situation I’m
currently in and get some more of his original albums. After all, as Cool J himself reminds us in “Mama Said Knock You Out”:
“Don’t call it a
comeback, I’ve been here for years.”
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