My Music History

Good Bad Albums

You know what I’m talking about. You listen to something as a joke. Show your friends, family, co-workers. Everyone has a laugh. You laugh every time. The absurdity that this music EXISTS at all fills you with joy. But it doesn’t end there, does it? You tell yourself you just want to fully dissect the insanity hidden inside this album. Let’s do another listen. Maybe there are other tracks that equally comical. Then another.

Now you’ve listened to it 10+ times by yourself. In your car. With your earbuds. Doesn’t matter. You’re not telling anyone about your shame cycle. You are KGB level secrecy. Maybe you listen to it again with others. You ask them “Remember how bad this album was?” You sit there actively insulting it but you’re happy it’s playing. You actually…like it.

That’s what this short review is about. Times where a joke listen spiraled out of control. A glimpse into my life experience as an obsessive music fan always looking for their next fix.

Hulk Hogan & the Wrestling Boot Band’s Hulk Rules (1995)

Oh Hulkster. Such a huge part of my childhood. I vividly remember you slamming Andre the Giant in the Silverdome. The unstoppable force vs. the immovable object. R.I.P. to you both. You paved the way for so many others. Wait? Hulk Hogan’s not dead? I just assumed he was. My bad. Well, good job not dying, Mr. Hogan.

Peak Cringe Track: Hulkster in Heaven
I know. I get it. This track is about one of Hogan’s young fan dying during a match. It’s a tragic story. How dare I pick on this song? Well. Here’s the thing. Maybe his heart was in the right place. Maybe it wasn’t. I don’t know. You don’t know. But it’s narcissistic as hell. The kid died and the nearly 5 minute song is all about Hulk Hogan. So much you would think he died. As we covered earlier, he is definitely not dead. And this is definitely how you DON’T make a tribute song. There are of course numerous right ways. I can’t understand how it got on the album without a huge rewrite of the lyrics. This song literally makes him look so incredibly conceited.

Peak Hilarity Track: Hulkster’s Back
Hulk is rapping like it’s 1986 but it’s 1995. It’s such a wonderfully ridiculous song. He can’t rap but he is really trying. Reminds me when I was a kid and boomers would tell me that rapping was just talking. Singing takes real talent they said. Anybody can rap. And to that I say no. The chorus is equally comical with “Hey check out the pythons, baby” but no gun show though.

Peak Peak Track: American Made
There really isn’t anymore to say here. They used it as a theme song for Hogan in WCW. That puts it right up there with Real American. People enjoy this song and look back on it fondly without any irony whatsoever. If you’re a Jimmy Buffett fan, maybe you would score Wrestling Boot Traveling Band higher. But I’m not so I don’t.

Closing Thoughts: Is it worth a listen? Yes, if you were a Hulk Hogan fan as a kid. No, if you never watched this man rip his shirt in half while covered in sweat then drop a boot on another equally sweaty man to win a wrestling match. Just curious? Be careful. It may slam you from behind with a chair that’s been hidden under the ring the entire time.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms who read my blog. The last time I covered Mother’s Day was in my 9th Review. It was a quick shout out to my mom at the end of the review. In retrospect, it was kind of lame because my mom deserves more than that. She deserves her own post because of her profound impact on my life long obsession with music. My most vivid childhood memories usually involve music, thanks to my mom. She exposed me to a wide range of music as I was growing up thanks to her equal love of classical music (she’s a Beethoven kind of woman), rock and everything in-between. She also played the piano and even went to college for it after she graduated high school. Speaking of high school, she dazzled me with her tales of creating music, which included playing an awesome medley for a talent show in high school of the latest radio hits, which included Queen, Aerosmith and many others. Each song beautifully transitioned into the next. She even wrote her own music. Obviously, my mom was way cooler than I ever was in high school.

So many of her music traits later became mine. Her excitement for music transferred over to me. My mom would overflow with joy just by hearing Ella Fitzgerald’s rendition of Blue Skies. I get the same way with some of my favorite tracks; I just can’t help but smile. Also, like her, I want to share that joy with others. I also don’t think I would be so open minded about new music if it wasn’t for her. When your music role model is jamming to Marilyn Manson’s The Beautiful People on the radio when she’s giving you a ride to school, you can’t help but grow up with an open mind to everything that comes out.  Even now my mom is asking me about bands like Daft Punk. I firmly believe I will spend the rest of my life hunting down and enjoying new music. With my mom still doing it, I have no reason to doubt my prediction. So thank you, Mutti. If anybody is truly responsible for this blog coming into existence, it’s you. I always tell people that my momma raised me right when they’re surprised of my extensive knowledge of music released well before I was born.

My History with Hip Hop + Big Announcement

The Beginning: Every great love affair has an equally great beginning. Unfortunately, my affair starts with a lot of hate. During the early 1990’s, I straight up hated that crap. I hated the very albums I adore and praise today when they were first released. My siblings and their friends would play it obsessively on the large speakers we had in the front room. Bass was everything. I don’t remember if they ever actually blew out any speakers while doing this, but I know it drove my mom crazy. I know she didn’t want her speakers broken. So I wanted nothing to do with hip hop. It was the genre that broke stuff and caused pain. Nothing that was worth my time.

The Walls Come Down: By the late 1990’s, I had gotten over my initial hate. I had too many friends that liked it and it’s such a silly reason to discount an entire genre. DMX, Master P, 2Pac, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, Dr. Dre, Eminem, etc. were now in my life to an extent. I didn’t really seek out hip hop music in high school, but I was okay if it found me. It was a genre on equal footing with the others out there like jazz, pop and rock. By the time college started, hip hop was a regular in my music rotation. My freshman year, I very much enjoyed playing Dr. Dre’s The Chronic 2001 as loud as I could while living in the dorms. Regardless, I still wasn’t anywhere close to where I am now. So where does the story really begin? When did everything change?

The Real Beginning: The end of college is when it all happened. Nothing was ever the same after that night. It the night that Randy K (not his real name) handed me a silver CD-R with the name Oliver Hart, scribbled in black Sharpie, across the top of it. He had been playing it in the car that night, though it was kind of hard to hear since it wasn’t that loud. The point of that winter night was hanging out and talking and not listening to music. So I knew it sounded different and it had potential to be an album that I could like. I was actually much more taken with The Faint album I heard that night, which I also received a copy of. If you haven’t heard their song, Glass Danse, you are seriously missing out. My editor and I played that song a freaking bunch. It’s so infectious. So Oliver Hart kind of fell to the wayside until summer.

How Eye One the Write Too Think: So it turns out that Oliver Hart is actually a Minnesota-based rapper named Eyedea. Hart was just a pseudonym. Eyedea was my baptism into Underground Hip Hop. It lasted a little longer than your average one: three months. While slaving away at my co-op job in a cold research lab, I spent the entire summer listening to The Many Faces of Oliver Hart or How Eye One the Write Too Think on repeat with two other albums. While the two other albums were good, they really ended up serving as filler so I wouldn’t burn myself out on Eyedea’s album. When I wasn’t listening to it, I was waiting for it to come back up on my CD MP3 player.

Going Underground: Eyedea opened up a whole new world for me that, up until that point, I didn’t know was possible in music. His album is more of a philosophical discussion than music. In Step By Step, Eyedea explores the afterlife with two angels: one of them always lies and one of them always tells the truth. He could choose to go with only one of them. Choosing the right one would lead him to heaven and the other would drag him to hell. I’m sure, at this point, everyone is thinking of a certain scene from Labyrinth. Both the movie and the song cover the classic Knights and Knaves logic problem. But Eyedea’s solution to the problem was meant to make you think about it from yet another perspective. The fact that someone could rap a story about a logic problem blew my mind into a million tiny pieces. Bottle Dreams had an equally forceful impact on my views of what could be done with music. The song discusses the story of a young female violin prodigy who spent her life being molested by her father. It’s an incredibly sad song and there was no happy ending for her. Again, I couldn’t believe somebody could rap about such a topic. As unbelievable as the album was, I knew I couldn’t stop there. I needed more.

The Neverending Story: Flash forward over twelve years later and my love of hip hop has only grown stronger. I’ve revisited what was happening in the early 1990’s and I am absolutely grateful that I was alive to witness (even if I wasn’t paying attention as much as I should have been) what was going on in hip hop and the dramatic changes that were happening. Even today, I am astounded by what is going on in hip hop. If you’re still musically stuck in your teenage years and say there is no good music anymore, I’m sorry to break it to you, but you’re just being a lazy f**k. If you want the good s**t, you’re going to have to put some effort into seeking it out. If you do, you end up with hip hop music like dan le sac Vs Scroobius Pip‘s first single, Thou Shalt Always Kill in your life. It’s such a fantastic song. Dan le Sac’s beats are mesmerizing, and Pip’s lyrics are thought-provoking on so many levels. The video itself is incredibly playful visually. Why am I mentioning and focusing on this song? Because it is the reason for what’s going to be happening with Project Lt. Morning for the next 4 months.

The Big Announcement: One of the early decisions about this blog is that nobody would know what album was being reviewed until I published the review. The blog is more about the experience of going through my MP3 player and listening to all of the music than the music itself. This is why posts are titled things like Week 15 instead of the name of the album and why sometimes I end up reviewing horrible albums. However, for the next 15 reviews, I will be listening to some of the greatest albums ever recorded and each one makes an appearance in Thou Shalt Always Kill. In fact, I’m reviewing the albums in order of appearance so everyone can know what I’m reviewing long before I publish it. This is a pretty significant change for me, but like everything with this blog: let’s give it a try and see how it goes.

So without further ado may I present my next experiment for Project Lt. Morning: Just a Band.

PS I’m considering doing a tournament of the 15 albums plus Angles (the album the song, Thou Shalt Always Kill, is from) once all the review are done. Just a simple playoff bracket to figure out which album is the best. I have a feeling there are going to be a lot of 5 star reviews so I wanted to do something to differentiate them. There can be only one.