48. MOBB DEEP – “Shook Ones Pt II” (1995)
The UncoolTwo50 challenge period covers the time – roughly speaking, 1989 to 1996 – when I took a lot of my cues about music and its quality from the weekly music press. This period has a mixed reputation – it was the heyday of the build-em-up knock-em-down scene-making NME, which would come up with new “movements” on a regular basis. The first few times it pulled this trick I took it very seriously. From about 1992 I still read the NME but switched to Melody Maker, which seemed more curious, more diverse and more intellectually exciting. Sometimes the Maker’s attempts to broaden its mind were a bit awkward – around 1993 it declared that there’d always been a dance element to its coverage and acted as if nobody had written about house, techno, or drum’n’bass before, which mostly wasn’t true. But you did get the feeling it was making genuine efforts to do better on stuff like hip-hop. Of course, Britpop came along and both weekly papers lost a lot of their curiosity chasing it. Also, I left university.
Whatever edge the Melody Maker had on hip-hop coverage was down almost entirely to Neil Kulkarni, the late music writer who gives his name to the challenge’s affirmative-action protocol: a maximum of 70% of tracks purely credited to white men. As challenge master Arron happily acknowledges, the Neil Kulkarni Clause is a blunt instrument genre-wise, making no distinction between Beastie and Pet Shop Boys, Utah and Pale Saints. But it’s also a necessary instrument – it’s deliberately a very low bar, serving mainly as a nudge to remember diversity in your choices.
Kulkarni was a firebrand writer, as known for what he hated as what he loved. I met him once, for about two minutes at a gig where he was selling copies of alt-metal mag Terrorizer, and any eulogy I could offer would be phoney: like most friends-of-friends who die young, I took his second- or third-hand presence in my social circles for granted, and thought warmly of him while never taking the time to get to know him. I was shocked to hear he’d died, and felt a surge of gratitude for the music he’d introduced me to back in that time I’d read him weekly. I assumed most Melody Maker writers, even then, were much older than me. He really wasn’t.
“Shook Ones Pt II” is a young man’s record, about bravado and fear, two emotions linked by how people describe them: cold sweat, cold as ice. It’s a chilly record, matter-of-fact poker-faced rhymes on top of Havoc’s freezer unit drone, shards of piano poking through the tundra. It’s a remarkable beat for someone so young to have created, a sound that theatrically defies and embraces death at the same time. At some point Kulkarni wrote about it, or its parent album, in Melody Maker, and I filed the title away, hearing it a year or two after and returning to it occasionally. When I heard the bad news, it was the first song I played.
47. CHRIS REA – “Josephine (La Version Francaise)” (1987)
Working at the Music & Video Exchange – even in the books department – was a sneak preview of the universal jukebox era. We could borrow any record we wanted to play in the shop; we had a tape to tape deck in constant use under the counter, running off copies of out of print gems and new promos. Things that had been curiosities to a music press reader became easy reality, a balance to the horrific wages that meant I spent most of a year living off Gregg’s Sausage Rolls.
One day a promo came in for Classic Balearic Mastercuts. The idea of Balearic Beat – the legend of it, you might say – had a strong allure for me. Pop at its most open-minded, a dream of a moment when vibe, not genre, ruled the DJ booth and when The Woodentops would rub shoulders with obscure Arthur Russell 12”s and Chris Rea remixes. I glossed over the pharmaceutical building blocks needed to build utopia – from my bedroom it seemed an ideal of democratic taste.
In the world of mood-based Spotify playlists that dream is now a kind of norm and chill beats to study to are nobody’s path to paradise. Still, the Mastercuts compilation was a revelation at the time, ranging from the blissed out house of A Man Called Adam to the impish hopscotch of Lola’s “Wax The Van”. The track which started it all off was this Chris Rea 12”, a re-recording of “Josephine” meant for the European market where its sun-kissed ripples of synth and post-disco guitar figures wouldn’t create any kind of culture shock. The vocal, gruff and rockish, is untouched – Josephine is off living the island life, watching the sun come up after a night at Ku or Pacha; Chris, like me in the second-hand bookshop, can only dream fondly of such exotic shores.
46. SWV – “Right Here (Human Nature)” (1993)
Remarkable though his records were – and that includes the fucked-up, overdriven, later ones, documents of a burning brain (maybe a burning conscience too) – there was never much of a chance of Michael Jackson making my UncoolTwo50 list. There’s a balance in this game between “everyone owns this song” and “I own this song”, you need a bit of both – a track with some kind of public presence but a personal connection too. And Jackson ends up too far on the “everyone” end of things.
But this track, and its use of him! That’s a different thing. I don’t remember when I first heard “Right Here (Human Nature)”, or rather – since I guess it was pleasantly around at the time – when I first heard it. It feels like the kind of thing I moved around from house to house, PC to PC, existing as “righthere.mp3” in a folder, a constant, always soothing playlist presence. “Human Nature” is the dark horse of Thriller (well, unless PYT is), a cosmic coo that settles the jitters and twitches Jackson built his music around. SWV are simply making that subtext into text.