#10 Sadrach - The Beastie Boys

Hip hop. What's happened to you?  You've changed.  You used to be cool.  It used to be about the music...

Of course being white, my first exposure to hip hop was the Beastie Boys. But it was a good place to start.

I only really 'got' hip hop after I finished high school.  Going through school it was quite frowned upon to listen to rap or r'n'b in fact I really hated it with a passion.  I really couldn't relate to gangsta rap, too many 'bitches and ho's and bling' for a person eating up alternative music which preached the direct opposite.  Maybe that's why I gravitated to the Beastie Boys, because they were so different to the gangsta rap that was so predominant in the late 90's.  And for me, they were so goddamn cool.  The archetypal 90's band, drenched in irony.

Listening to the Beastie Boys is like looking at an encyclopaedia of pop culture.  In Sadarach squeeze in references to Rambo, Charles Dickens, JD Salinger and Harry S Truman, amongst others.

And the music.  I have been listening to a bit of hip hop lately and it is cliced, but hip hop really has died a slow and painful death.  Where are the beats?  Where is the sampling?  Sampling was the best thing about hip hop.  The fact that you can turn something like a Beatles song on its head without descending in sacrilege. That was the art of hip hop.

So thank you Beastie Boys for constantly being able to produce smart, creative hip hop without losing all self respect and credibility like this. And this.

Enjoy hip hop before It was acquired in a hostile takeover by major record labels, homogenised, then sold off piece by piece.

#9 Vasoline - Stone Temple Pilots

This follows on nicely from the previous post because it reminds me of the same year.  1995, my first year of high school.  There was a radio station back in Hawkes Bay called 'Hot 93FM', and they used to play fairly alternative music, well not really that alternative, but fairly alternative compared to what I had previously listened to.

Now you have to remember that this was in the dying days of radio stations being stand alone.  Now there is only really a small amount of national stations owned by large conglomerates pumping out lowest common denominator rubbish.  Back in 1995 we still had regional stations which could still play music that was slightly edgy.  But I digress.

93FM had a 'Top 9 at 9' and it introduced me to a whole lot of music that might not have ever heard.  Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and along with such gems as "Who the fuck is Alice?" and "Cotton eye joe" and Stone Temple Pilots.  I love and hate Stone Temple Pilots in equal measure.  In particular their first album is generic crap, timed to cash in on the wave of grunge bands popular at the time. But their second album just hit at the right time for me.

When I first heard Vasoline I loved it, enough to tape it off the radio.  I then managed to buy the cassette of Purple and thrash to pieces over the summer on holidays and trips to the beach.

To this day I still have a strong fondness for that album.  For me when I hear it I will always think of the 45 minute trip (my Dad driving of course to Ocean Beach to go body boarding with my best mate.  Funnily the car ride out there was the same running length as the album.  The excitement of the waves that lay ahead of us as you approached the steepest descent to a beach I think, in the entire world (well it seemed so at the age of 13).  And then on the way home once you had the exhilaration behind you, the salt still fresh on your lips, and the beginnings of the sunburn to come, you could enjoy the album again.  I don't think my Dad quite grasped it.

It's a quirk of growing up that this was Stone Temple Pilots only good album.  The rest of their music was as clichéd as Scott Weiland's descent into drug abuse.  I also see that 93FM is now 97.2 More FM.

Sunrise, sunset.

Stone Temple Pilots  - Vasoline