Missing in action
Greetings readers (both of you). Due to recent schedule wackiness I have been stuck on a few items these past few weeks. I hope to get my mind out of this downward spiral in the next few days but thought I would offer up a small video sample (with article text) of what I’m working on to whet your appetites.
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I keep finding myself thinking back on this show. It was late June and felt the same as Christmas in the sense that your thoughts of winter all revolve around Christmas, not January and February. When this show ended, it felt like the summer was over, even with July and August on the horizon
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A girl, the first girl I ever kissed (I won’t tell you I was a 23-year-old loser before I achieved that fact — doh!) made me a tape. I remember listening to it in the parking lot of some store waiting to attend a work function. I was smoking a cigarette and eating a Wendy’s frosty (I’ve been fat and gross for as long as I can remember) and “Ask” came up on the tape. It was the first time I had ever realized how much unconscious narrative we used to place on mixtapes, especially if it was deliberate. I heard the chorus. I realized I’d made a huge mistake
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The song “Animal,” a personal favorite from the time I watched the band perform the song at the 1993 Video Music Awards, remains a strong song for my enjoyment. It is short and has impact and doesn’t feel like a victim to the lyrical wordiness I now find in so many of the band’s songs.
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After watching the video for “Party Rock” a million times I recently heard a new single from the album, “Sexy and I Know It,” and having had such a positive response to that early video I found the new one. Hilarious is one way to describe the clip, the other is to point out that the clip offers most flagrant banana hammock flaunting since Hammer’s 1994 epic “Pumps and a Bump.”
I bought the cassette at a shop called Booming Records, in the Campus Town Mall in East Lansing in 1989. I was a freshman in high school. The tape changed my life, not just for the rapping, but for the music. Years later I found out that the Mass Production song “Firecracker” formed the basic music for “Me So Horny,” and this made me smile and find the song in my collection. But the beauty of sampling during this era was the fact that you DIDN”T NEED TO GET CLEARANCE to run these samples. It isn’t like modern times, with royalties and such. This LP is along the lines of Paul’s Boutique by the Beastie Boys as you had sample dense recording that foreve changed you thinking of certain songs. Nasty As We Wanna Be was the first place I ever heard Kraftwerk. Yes, the 2 Live Crew sampled Kraftwerk’s 1978 track “The Man Machine.” Not only did they sample the song, they used the sample on a track entitled “Dick Almighty.”
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Mike Vincent is a teacher, dreamer, grouch, and runner. He lives in northern Michigan and his favorite Beatle is George Harrison.
