Get On Down / Sony /Ruffhouse / Columbia (2017, Reissue)
Every Wednesday, in honor of Ed Lover Dance Day from Yo MTV Raps, I take a break from rock and roll to write a little bit about hip hop. In the late 80s and early 90s hip hop ruled my musical life. During this often called 'Golden Era' I discovered so much incredible music. As I am slowly replacing the CDs I've had for 25+ years with vinyl copies, I'm going to talk about some albums that had a really important impact on me during some very formative years.
The first dozen or so times I heard the song "Everybody Have Fun Tonight" by Wang Chung when I was a kid, I absolutely hated it. I would cringe when it came on and wanted nothing to do with it. For whatever reason, that song was omnipresent in 1986 and I just couldn't avoid it. But a funny thing happened, I started to enjoy it. I'm not exactly sure how it happened or why I had a change of heart, but I asked my dad to buy me the 7" of it. I played it to death. To this day it's my favorite song of the genre of music people are talking about when they say 80s music.
How does Wang Chung play into a Cypress Hill review? For me, Cypress Hill was a very similar thing. The first song I heard from their self titled debut was "The Phuncky Feel One" and I saw the video for it quite a bit on Yo MTV Raps. I really did not like that song and was pretty annoyed that Yo was wasting their very valuable time with this video. Eventually it went away, but soon after that the video for "How I Could Just Kill A Man" showed up. Much to my surprise, I was taken in by that song. While B Real's nasally vocal delivery annoyed me in "The Phuncky Feel One," here it was a real positive and meshed wwell with the more upbeat production.
I ended up buying the album and just played it so, so many times. It became one of my absolute favorites and to this day I still get a fuzzy nostalgic feeling when I listen to it. I never really liked any of the other Cypress Hill albums as much as this one. Black Sunday had some good songs on it, but "Insane In The Membrane" kind of got played into the ground back then. But, this first album is a little slab of perfection and was a key album to pick up as I replace my hip hop CDs with vinyl.
Cypress Hill - S/T (YouTube Playlist):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DylcCVjEyiw&list=PLEF46578166FFCF03
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