No intro today, just tunes.
De La Soul, "Jenifa Taught Me (Derwin's Revenge)"
I remember being pretty baffled by a lot of the slang that De La Soul used on Three Feet High and Rising. This is mainly because I was a sheltered 14-year-old boy living in Spokane, and the internet didn't exist to sort things out for me (or misinform me, to be fair). I worked out the general gist of a fair bit of it, and it never really bothered me or stopped me from listening to the music, but I was nevertheless baffled. I think it was an album designed to baffle folks.
Type the word baffle enough and it starts looking pretty funny, by the way.
One of the fun things about doing this is that sometimes pulling stuff up on Youtube leads to some fun ratholes. Like coming across this video for "A Roller Skating Jam Called Saturdays", which is delightful. And, man, De La Soul were so good.
Lostbone, "Destroy What Destroys You"
Nope, no recollection of how this ended up in the library. There was some point where I got some random pack of albums from a Humble Bundle at some point, because I wanted one of them, and I think it's possible this was one of the other throw ins? Anyway, this is pretty typical of something called "metalcore", and usually this stuff just kind of bores me. Let's move on.
Game Theory, "The World's Easiest Job"
Scott Miller's underground pop band put out a series of critically acclaimed albums in the 80s that never really penetrated the mainstream at all. By the time I was really tuned in to the scene, they were already a band that was mostly spoken of as a "should have been". Going back and revisiting those albums much after the fact made me appreciate them, though.
MF Doom, "Poo-Putt Platter"
Seems like as good a time as any to link out to this fun video on rhyme schemes, which includes our boy MF Doom. Who, um, doesn't actually do any rhyming here. Whatever!
The Slackers, "No More Crying"
I'm a little surprised it's taken this long to get to the best band of the third-wave of ska, The Slackers. Their first album was released by Moon Ska in 1996 during the peak of the third wave's popularity, but they stood out for a much more traditional take than a lot of other bands. They then proceeded to keep cranking out great albums even up until today. They'll come up again, so I'll rank albums later, but really: they're the best of that entire scene, with Redlight and Wasted Days being my first choices.