JAZZYJEFF AND THE FRESH PRINCE – "Boom! Shake The Room"

This seems so much bigger to me than a bunch of recent 7s. Easily an 8.

Craig Pilling of the Student Radio Network’s Late Show created a phone-in game where the callers have to choose which wire to cut so not to blow up.

He created the game purely as am excuse to use the “Tick tick tick boom” sample as the intro…

(The Late Show was simulcast on all the finest Uni Radio stations in the UK in the early Noughhties, and thhanks to the web stream of University Radio Nottingham was on at 10am here in Oz. I came across it as my Australian Uni radio station was looking into copying URN’s web streaming solution, which we did…)

Ah, one of my favourite memories is screaming this at the top of my lungs at karaoke at the Polar Bear back in the day.

Rap in 1993 meant for me Midnite Marauders by A Tribe Called Quest, one of my favourite of all hip hop albums, a beautifully stinging hour of sublime chord changes and dark thoughts, an indispensable accessory on the Monday morning Oxford Tube journey back into West London, especially when the sun shone. Not far behind came the great and now largely forgotten Justin Warfield with his astonishing, barrier-smashing psychedelic masterpiece My Field Trip To Planet 9 and its lead single “Fisherman’s Grotto,” twisting Blood, Sweat and Tears to its own ends and cheerfully citing the Pharcyde and the Lemonheads as equals. The critics’ choice was Cypress Hill and the Goth semi-dementia of Black Sunday (“Insane In The Brain” too could only have arisen from 1967), the ageing punks’ choice was the ebullient Doggystyle, and there was also the remarkable Tricks Of The Shade by The Goats, politically acute and musically so inventive few have yet caught up with it (as for Enter The Wu-Tang, we didn’t get that here until early 1994). And towering above all of this was of course The Chronic, a record now so ensconced in Rap’s Rich Tapestry even Sir Tim Rice spins it on Radio 2.

I also confess to an inbuilt bias against “Boom! Shake The Room” since it leapfrogged the Pet Shop Boys’ perfect “Go West” to get to the top – and really it would have been much better had the DJ and rapper topped the chart with the near-perfect “Summertime,” one of the numerous 1991 hits which would better have occupied the Bryan Adams perch. Still, it’s a harmless enough good-time party record slithering through its Ohio Players samples (“Funky Worm”) over which Will Smith slides with his affable apathy, like hip hop’s Dean Martin. It lifts itself above mediocre by virtue of Smith’s early, stark declaration “My life is a cage but on stage I’m free” and his well-paced stuttering verse – but then it’s scarcely “Lose Yourself” and I remain at something of a loss as to what this record was actually doing at number one.

I’d quite forgotten about “Summertime”. Well, I’m happy to add that to the rather lenghty list of “tracks that are better than this one”.

I didn’t mind some of Will Smith’s solo stuff. I liked to imagine that the Nigerien Tourist Board would adapt one of his songs, with a cheery TV ad of people singing that they were going to Niamey

Wibbly wobbly wibbly wobbly tell me what’s up!

For me this is one of the most unapologetically uplifting 90s Popular entries (as was No Limit). Hook after hook, and it even includes a nod to Kris Kross’s largely forgotten Warm It Up.

Re 2: “nodding idiotically towards MTV or Saturday morning kid’s TV”? Pffft! I’d rather Hip Hop did that than nodding empathetically towards the sixth form common room.

When I was listening to “Illegal Business”, my younger stepbrothers were listening to “Nightmare On My Street”. So yes, Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince were not tailored to fit my age group. It would be a tad unfair to pop a Fisher-Price label on them, because what they did manage to do was do pop well. The only difference was their brand of pop just happened to have rapping in it. What they also did was kind of clear a space with “Parents Just Don’t Understand” for Tone Loc, Kid & Play and Young MC to spearhead an “acceptable face of rap” movement. That probably gave the space for Vanilla Ice and Partners In Kryme to achieve #1 success before Townes and Smith could get a look-in. “Boom! Shake The Room” is fun, even if some of Smith’s flow is a tad clunky in places.

We will never know what a Wack Jam tastes like, as Will told his mother he’d never do one.

I BIP MY JAM WACK AND FORTH

This is one of those where the fondness with which you remember a song – personal and collective memory obv – trumps everything else (I mean, it’s not like I sit down to listen to it regularly). It’s kind of like to have its proper impact in 2012 it has to emerge unexpectedly in some public context, like a party or in the news or something. Maybe it’s comparable to a song like “Single Ladies” – more of a jingle than a song, and I appreciate it much more as a pop cultural behemoth than as a piece of music. Which is to say, [10].

(heh @17: had Cher Lloyd reached the X Factor final the other year, her final performance was going to be a mash-up of “Boom! Shake The Room” and “Whip My Hair”. I still feel incredibly bitter that we as a society were robbed of that moment.)

Now then – here’s a 45 which hasn’t figured much in my life since it peaked at number one, but did prove to be an inescapable and not unwelcome soundtrack during its time near the top of the charts. By the time I left my dull, drab small town filled with strange, judgemental locals to go to university in ’93, this song had climbed all the way to the summit, and the noise of it at Fresher’s Discos and student events was all too common.

I could be painting a rosier picture here than was actually the case, but I’m pretty sure it was one of those records absolutely everyone responded to, and the reasons for me seem to be twofold. Firstly, it’s an incredibly well produced track which manages to combine a sense of excitement and euphoria with enough twists, turns and flourishes to seem like something which isn’t just the usual barnstorming clatter that some students tended to respond to at the time (and may still respond to for all I know). Secondly, I know that I projected my own situation on to the track, and I’m assuming others may have done so too – I’d been stuck in a situation that seemed boring and restricting for far too long, so the momentum in the track and the words “Tick tick tick tick BOOM!” weren’t a bad thing to express myself to (albeit badly) on the dancefloor. It seemed like such a brilliant soundtrack for what felt like a sudden, seismic change in my life.

If it hadn’t have been for my personal circumstances, would I have cared? Probably, although perhaps not so much. I remember enjoying hearing the single on the radio and “The Chart Show” before I even left for university, and there’s evidence that I bothered to tape the video off the television when it entered the charts which is a sign it clearly got the thumbs-up from me beforehand. I haven’t bothered to revisit it much since ’93, I don’t own a copy, and I doubt it’s something I’ll feel the need to return to again regularly in the future, but I can actually clearly remember certain important moments of my life being soundtracked around this song, and there aren’t many other entries on “Popular” I can honestly say that about.

I have no recollection of BSTR from the time, and I’m not much moved by it now. But I can *kind* of hear how it’s a sort of pop-rap comfort food that could soundtrack good times; sort of like Junior MC’s Bust A Move, which was no Eric B and Rakim or PE, but still quite a lot of fun. (But I much prefer Bust a Move!)

Smith really announced himself as an actor to watch around this time with Six Degrees of Separation. Though he’s been a pretty great star ever since, I’m not convinced that Smith’s quite fulfilled his acting promise.

He’s a terrific comedy actor in eg MIB1 and 2 (I know everyone except me hates MIB2 but Smith is nevertheless excellent in it). Too much of his “serious” material undersells him badly (I am Legend, I am Robot, I am Independence Day)

What’s he like in I am Ali?

^^ fnur, fnur.

One thing that may work in “actor” Will Smith’s favour is his physicality. His origin as a Hype Man in Philly, whipping up a crowd, and FPoBA was filmed in front of a studio audience, as close to theatre as you get in downtown Burbank. That kind of stagecraft lends itself easily (ie. knowing where your audience/camera is, using the space you have to full effect) to the requisite greenscreen work in CGI-heavy films that Smith is very familiar with. Probably why directors like him.

Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince were multi-platinum rappers before Will Smith was on TV (in fact he was in a TV show because he was a multi-platinum rapper). So it’s a bit weird to suggest that being on TV is his gimmick: being a rapper is his actual gimmick.

(Jump is also built round a Funky Worm sample, which is why the songs sound similar.)

The first actual single I ever bought! (I already had a couple of albums (on cassette), both similarly pop-rap) Very fond memories obv.

#33 I meant Kris Kross in regards to the gimmick not Will Smith. You’ve got to admit both songs share more elements than an Ohio Players sample.

Re 27: He’s not bad in Ali, which is also not a bad movie, although I remember it being fairly/radically unfocussed. But he really has taken the easy options since…

I’ve never really taken to him as a rapper – he’s competent without actually being good, and his charm is so forced.

I wish you guys had had “Summertime” top your chart.

Hmmm, that generational divide arises again (he writes, two days after raising his bat to the pavilion for a half-century). This kind of thing was to become all too familiar at number one: a few minutes of empty bigging-up and laboured similes from the rapper, while the musical backing might sound good but has invariably been nicked from someone else’s creativity. I do find Smith engaging and have enjoyed some of his stuff, but – well, I’m not proposing to retire from Popular, but my comments on this type of record might be brief and formulaic.

I’m prepared to revise this mark downwards if the words “tick, tick, tick tick BOOM!” don’t get out of my bloody head by tomorrow morning. [7]

How nice to see, incidentally, that Popular will later meet songs with 100%, 200% and 300% more boomage.

My key memory of this was its use as the concluding number in my Year 5 class’s end of year performance, which chronicled, in somewhat potted terms, the history of pop music in five songs. (If I recall correctly – and I do – the sequence was ‘In the Mood’ – ‘All Shook Up’ – ‘Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In’ – Sweet Child o’ Mine – BStR).

For reasons perhaps not unrelated to my memory of dancing to this dressed as Private Pike, I have made no attempt to seek this out since then. Listening to it now, I find it very likable, while noting that Smith’s habit of taking an audible breath at the end of every line (a sort of aural full stop) doesn’t exactly enliven his flow.

If only he’d seen Rod Hull’s rider he might’ve been more prepared for Emu’s brutal attack.