I’ve been writing about a lot of New York early-mid nineties Hip-Hop lately. I don’t know why, but I’m gonna go with it.
I love this song. I always have. It’s one of my all time favorites. Who else could say “Timbs all seasons for ass kicking reasons” and make it sound so peace. They were on some ‘just the two of us’ shit before Will Smith, who doesn’t even deserve to be mentioned in this post even if your mother does happen to think he’s loveable. I’m not hating, they just don’t belong in the same paragraph together, but I have put them in the same paragraph together because I know that if I don’t some schmuck is going to say that, “They used the Will Smith beat.”
Smif-n-Wessun reminds me of 22’s (not 40’s), blunts, Timbs, goose-down coats and Thanksgiving leftovers, and the first time I smoked dust (on purpose). Also, check the joint ‘Hallucinations’ off of their ‘Dah Shinin’ album, that’s the song I had playing in my head as it took me 40 minutes to walk down one single block.
This song is off one of the first hip-hop CD’s I ever purchased. I was 13 or 14 and was kicked out of my house after a night of hard drinking with my boy Vinny, who was older and some other older kids. I remember them playing me Biohazard and Onyx collabos, there may have been a video of the same variety. I think I smoked some PCP laced weed (unknowingly) and drank more than I could handle (in fear of being considered a lightweight) and stayed out to like 7 in the morning, getting kicked out by my pops at 8, returning to the party spot, to find the older kid who’s house it was smoking a joint on his corner. I never thought to ask him why he was still hanging around outside after a night of partying, but we went down to Looney Tunes, the local record store, and I had a decision to make. It was a toss up between Ice-T’s ‘Home Invasion’ or KRS-One’s ‘Return of the Boom Bap’… I chose the latter… I wonder what would have happened if I had bought the Ice-T album. Would it have had some serious effect on my life? Who knows. But the real question is: Why would I buy a CD if I was kicked out of my house? Where did I intend to play it? My CD player was at home in my house.
I did get back in my house later that night, but that was one of many drug/alcohol fueled incidents that led my parents, with help from the P.I.N.S. program, to sign me in to a behavioral facility for children… (Brunswick in L.I. for all you psycho-ward aficionados).
That’s life.
But anyway this song reminds me of that turning point in my youth, when I started messing with graffiti… not on the subway, like KRS says, but I was getting ‘chased by cops almost everyday’, but not in the Bronx, in Long Island… but somehow it still spoke to me. For years I had my own video for this song that would play in my head, picturing a young KRS chillin’ with Rakim at rooftop parties, living in a group home, battling other MC’s in the shelter… I like my video better the actual video, but I was too young to direct videos at that time and it probably would have cost at hundred times more than this one, which I wouldn’t have been able to swing a budget like that even if I hoarded all my lunch money for a year.
