I’ve just returned from an out of town visit with my family. It’s a long
drive and Sheila and I have a tradition of choosing four albums each for the
drive. While my collection is always full of new music, for this trip we tend
to go with comfort food or, at the very least, something our partner is going
to be OK with. Here are the 8 albums that made the cut for 2020. I’ve reviewed
six of these, as noted:
- Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit – The Nashville Sound (Disc 1050)
- Blue Oyster Cult – Setlist: The Very Best of Blue Oyster Cult Live (Disc 1333)
- Confidence Man – Confident Songs for Confident People (Disc 1310)
- Frank Turner – Love, Ire and Song (Disc 1253)
- Billy Idol – Billy Idol/Rebel Yell
- Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris – Western Wall: The Tucson Sessions (Disc 987)
- Xanadu Motion Picture Soundtrack
- Eric B. and Rakim – Paid in Full (Disc 473)
The first four are my
selections, and with three of them reviewed in the last year, it demonstrates that
recent reviews tend to stay in my head for a while. This is a good thing – now let’s
go cram something else in there now!
Disc 1336 is…Greatest
Hits
Artist:
Rodney O &
Joe Cooley
Year of Release: 2001 but
featuring music from 1988 to 1999
What’s up with the
Cover?
Two cool dudes strike two cool poses. Assuming that’s Rodney O. on the left, he
appears to be dressed for inclement weather. Joe Cooley has prepared for a warm,
sunny day. When they eventually get out of the studio, one of these guys is going
to have picked the wrong outfit – we just don’t know who yet.
Other than that, this cover looks like a photo that’s been run one too
many times through a streaky photocopier.
How I Came to Know
It: I think my old coworker
Mike might have sent me a song by these guys, causing me to start digging into
their back catalogue. Turns out finding their original albums on CD is
difficult, so I finally broke down and bought this Greatest Hits package. The
search for the individual records is continuing.
How It Stacks Up: This is a Greatest
Hits album and by CD Odyssey common law, does not get stacked up.
Ratings: Greatest Hits albums also don’t get rated. They
aren’t real albums.
Greatest Hits records end up in my collection
for one of two reasons. The first is when I like an artist just enough to want
their hits, but only their hits. Like how I feel about Kool & the Gang or
the Thompson Twins. I like those bands but not enough to want all their records;
not even enough to want a sampling of their best. Just well enough to have the
hits.
The other reason I have greatest hits records
is as a placeholder while I keep looking for the individual albums that I
really want in my collection. Old school LA rappers Rodney O. & Joe Cooley are
this latter variety, and so as I prepared for my first listen it was with a
mild but nagging irritation that I’d had to settle. This irritation was made
worse when I realized that classics like the title track from the 1990 record “Three
the Hard Way” wasn’t even on the record. I remain irritated about these things,
but I couldn’t remain irritated at Rodney O. & Joe Cooley; their music is
just too much fun to stay angry.
Coming out of L.A. at the same time as N.W.A.,
Rodney and Joe have the same easy funky flow, but with a lot less edge and
anger. I like both acts, but Rodney and Joe are a lot more upbeat. These guys make
party music that’s good for driving, good for dancing, and, if you can keep up,
good for singing along. That won’t be easy, because rapper Rodney O may have a flow
that sounds effortless, but that’s only because his ability for dropping down
into the pocket is so sneaky-good.
The album is heavily weighted toward their
1988 debut “Me and Joe” with 5 of the 12 tracks coming off of that record. That
record benefits from the lack of sampling laws at the time, letting DJ Joe
Cooley pull all kinds of sounds and song fragments into building his beats. There
are a couple of times when the sample runs a little long, but you mostly forgive
the excess because their songs end up being so funky.
The rhymes are not as intricate as you’d get
from a contemporary master like Rakim, and Rodney doesn’t have the attention-grabbing
fury of Ice Cube, but he holds his own and gives a nice flow. “U Don’t Hear
Me Tho’” and “Get Ready to Roll” are both standouts and deserved
more commercial love than they got back in the day (I didn’t buy it either, but
in my defence I didn’t know any rap back then).
While it’s a greatest hits package and not a true
record, whoever put the album together made good decisions on song order, shuffling
the songs out of chronological order and giving it a nice flow of early and
late tracks, and effectively hiding the excess reliance on their 1988 release. Rodney
O. & Joe Cooley switched record labels on almost every release, and I
wouldn’t be surprised if some of these choices were the result of copyright and
licensing issues. If they were, at least they did well with what they had
available.
Anyway, this record does not re-invent the rap
genre, but it is a sold example of late eighties/early nineties golden age rap
that drops some dope grooves and has fun doing it.
Best tracks: U Don’t Hear Me Tho’, Humps for the Boulevard, DJs
and MCs, Get Ready to Roll, Cooley High, Why Must I Be Like That
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