djregular

Spare me the Hallmark Karl Marx.

Game and Music Lover. Writer. Unfortunate optimist.



Dunno if this will be more than one post, but this song popped into my head today, so I thought I'd share. Y'all remember The Boogiemonsters? Very 90s rap group, the RIYL for them would basically be offspring of the Native Tongues and any other rap from that time period that wouldn't really exist without groups like De La and ATCQ, but weren't directly related. Think like, Bush Babees (another, 'y'all remember'-ass group).

I loved "Recognized Thresholds of Negative Stress" so much when I was kid, so the album (Riders of the Storm: The Underwater Album) ended up being one of the first albums I bought with my own money. The rest of the album is basically right in this wheelhouse, uptempo, posi-vibes interspersed with a melange of spiritual references (Christianity, Rastafarianism, and various Eastern beliefs all get burn here, and the name LP name is a very purposeful reference to The Doors), fun production (I never really dug into it, but it sounded like there were bits of live instrumentation in there). Except there's also an extremely creepy song on there about a serial killer who targets children in the belief that he's saving their souls by killing them before the can be corrupted by the world. I give you "Old Man Jacob's Well":

CW: child in peril, kidnapping, serial killers, child murder, invoking god's judgement

The whiplash from "Strange" (a song that samples the Cameo song "She's Strange") to this song is fucking JARRING when you're listening to the album straight through, and it just goes right back to the good times right afterward.

After this album, they all went hardcore Seventh Day Adventist. Two of the members of the group left outright because the music industry (and maybe Hip Hop altogether) were incongruent with their beliefs, and the remaining members put out a second record called God Sound, which I have but is nowhere near as fun/good due in large part to the aforementioned hardcore Seventh Day Adventism. My headcanon is that this song unlocked something arcane and haunted them until the group eventually broke up altogether.

A personal DJ Regular fun fact: When I was playing World of Darkness TTRPGs online as a youth, I ran a 1 on 1 scene for a friend where their character (a Black Fury) and my ST PC (a Gangrel who was friendly with werewolves) hunted down a Formori I based on Old Man Jacob. If you understood all of that, you qualify for the veterans' discount at the post-LARP Denny's meet-up. Jokes aside, I miss those two characters a lot. Their team-up was like Bunk and McNulty, but if the former was a feminist werewolf, and the latter was a lot more Catholic.

Anyway, have a spooky rap for Halloween.


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in reply to @djregular's post:

Oh yeah, I didn't even think of "Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa" in this context, but that's a good pull! When I talked about it elsewhere I compared it to murder ballads, and certain kinds of blues records where it's like, "Here's a story, and someone's gonna be dead at the end of it."