Wanna Review Your Middle School Years?
(Re-released from the vaults)
Review by Matthew Webber
Young MC’s "Bust a Move" music video flashes across the television screen. A geeky music critic (um, not me) grins his whitewashed picket fence grin. He stares into your eyes/soul and does his best Ron Popeil homage:
"Do you remember standing against the wall at your seventh grade dance, admiring the acne-less 90210 reject flop his bowl haircut as he danced the Roger Rabbit and the Running Man as your favorite rapper at the time, MC Hammer, cautioned U not to touch him and your foot tapped uncontrollably but you wouldn’t actually dance at a school dance for another two years?
"Do you remember when the actor Mark Wahlberg was a rapper named Marky Mark? And do you ever lose sleep wondering when the Funky Bunch will get their own Behind The Music episode?
"Do you wax nostalgic for the [here, the geek elaborately quotes with his fingers] ‘hippin’est, hoppin’est cuts in hip-hop history,’ or at least for the poppy machinations that passed for real rap from ’87 to ’92?
"If the answer is yes – and I assure you it should be – then the Millennium Hip-Hop Party is the album for you. Containing eighteen of your puberty’s greatest hits, the Millennium Hip-Hop Party will turn your next party into the Millennium This Friggin' Rules, Dude, Party. Your all-time favorite songs (until you discovered grunge) are together for the first and only time on one CD."
As various members of the studio audience attempt to do me baby, a-do the Humpty Hump, keep doin’ the Hump, the geek advises you to act now and reach for your Visa or Mastercard and purchase the only compilation album you’ll ever need to own, which is only available for an unlimited time and is actually available in stores!
The track listing flows over the babies who got back, around the way girls, parents who just don’t understand and G thangs: Run-DMC’s "Walk This Way," Tone Loc’s "Funky Cold Medina," PM Dawn’s "Set Adrift on Memory Bliss," Arrested Development’s "Tennessee," House of Pain’s "Jump Around," Naughty By Nature’s "Hip Hop Hooray," Snoop Doggy Dogg’s "What’s My Name?" and every aforementioned song to which you still know all the words. (I know you do. You probably still know "Shoop," too.)
As if one compendium of memories from the most awkward years of your life weren’t enough, you can now own the New Millennium Hip-Hop Party, which features "blazin’-hot B-boy favorites to help you get your bounce on" such as Tone Loc’s "Wild Thing," MC Hammer’s "Pray," Naughty By Nature’s "O.P.P.." A Tribe Called Quest’s "Scenario," Coolio’s "Gangsta’s Paradise," Arrested Development’s "People Everyday," DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince’s "Summertime," Snow’s "Informer" (the single greatest song by a white Canadian who sounds Jamaican) and awesome songs you loved but forgot, like N2Deep’s "Back to the Hotel."
To tell you how phat these CDs are, I’ll revert to my pre-nocturnal emission hyperbole and tell you these are the greatest CDs of all time, not only for the songs but also for the hilarious liner notes.
You’ll laugh out loud as Snow "earns his props" as a gangsta rapper worthy of being on the same album as the Notorious B.I.G. You’ll cry when you realize how condescending it is to be a genuine fan of rap music and have to "consider yourself schooled" by the fan site-style language.
The geek says: "If I were to create a mix tape of every song I don’t just love but need, it would sound something like these CDs. Thank you, Rhino records, for doing it for me!"
