Cypress Hill - IV (1998)

One evening, Alexis, the other transfer student, took the trolleybus with me, and I went out of my way to go down as far away from my own home and as near hers as possible, because her conversation was delicious.  At the time, I was obsessively spinning what I consider to be the absoute peak point of Cypress Hill's career, IV, and I happened to quote a line from the chorus of a song; "From the window of my room, I shoot all stars." I don't think I'll ever forget that little sparkle in her bright blue eyes when she commented that that, she wanted me to not forget, because she would, and she wanted to write it down somewhere.

One snowy night in Bratislava, and I had From the Window of My Room in mind.  I walked back home, quite a ways back, with IV in my ears.  I remember that I was all the way up to Audio X when I got there.

Cypress Hill's IV is part of what I call an unholy trinity in their discography*, but I happen to think it as the finest album of their career.  The first reason is obvious: the darkness inherent in Cypress Hill reaches maturation with this one, having brought itself to the fore before.  Further, the cover image you see up there reflects the album perfectly, as it is plague green and riddled with skeletons, in the closet, under the ground and walking the streets.

There is something about IV that always brings fond memories to mind and a smile to my face.  At a raging 18 tracks, it has some of their most brilliant work.  Lyrically, Cypress Hill is on another level. Not fond of messing around, the album kicks open with Lookin' Through the Eye of the Pig.  This one is a police officer's musings through his regular day, and while it starts as a hard day in the life of a cop, it quickly degenerates into pure personal apocalypse and the cop turns out to be in the middle of a divorce ("My marriage is all fucked, my wife is with the neighbors"), corrupt, dealing drugs, and fades out during a standoff... it's bone-chilling.

Then comes Checkmate ("Checkmate, fool! Hang them high!") which is a fun fist-in your face song with a rocking sampled piano.  It's sort of in line with the later Riot Starter, which I'd remember when I was in an actual riot, screaming my lungs off.  Siren-like synthesizer laid under the rapid-fire lyrics, it carries that fist-in-the-air spirit, a touch of anarchy.  (Goin' All Out) Nothin' to Lose is the unhinged, more personal version of that, more to deal with finally sayin "fuck it" and dealing with it.

In these harder-hitting songs, Cypress Hill's first brush with metal, Lightning Strikes.  While rap and rock had met a few times before, this was a different beast altogether.  Also of note is that B-Real would feature on a Fear Factory album, the 2001 Digimortal, on the track Back the Fuck Up.  This little experiment would branch out within Cypress Hill as well, and end up making the song that made me pay attention in the first place.

In another vein, From the Window of My Room is a profound song, with Sen Dog delivering "From my window I can see: reality has gone insane, G." No wonder she was impressed, it is an introspective song that taught me to look inside first, not out - who you are, not who you want to be.

Similarly, High Times, the mellow companion of Dr. Greenthumb and the closer, Case Closed were, in isolation not notable at all, but as a part of the whole, perfect parts in a well-oiled machine.  Case Closed  in particular is one of the best closers I've heard... yes, that includes now.

Of course, it wasn't all serious. When it's Cypress Hill, fun is always on the menu, and two songs deliver: I Remember That Freak Bitch (From the Club) which would supply me with a hilarious line about protein ("High and rich!") and, the unforgettable single about a marijuana expert that does his own TV commercials, Dr. Greenthumb.  The latter song is hilarious not because of the tribal chanting in the chorus or the commercial that opens it, but because it ends on a cliffhanger, with Dr. Greenthumb on the run from the DEA.

The album also has skits*, four, I think, that aren't marked separately but are parts of a song.  The storyline is interesting: a gangster, straight out of jail, wants to celebrate with his homies, so he goes to the local weed man for party favors.  The weed man, reputed to have the best shit ever, gives him a time and a place.  They meet up there, they wait, but he's a no-show.   When the album ends, finally, long after night has fallen, he actually does show up, and hands them a single joint.  He then produces seeds - seeds that you "put in the ground" so you can "grow it", telling them that with two seeds, they have a hundred pounds' worth.  He then gets in his car and drives away, leaving the homeboys with a single joint and two seeds they don't know what the fuck to do with.

An example of this is Tequila Sunrise, famous for its Latin flavor, which, being a rather bright, under-the-sun tequila and good times vibe, has the line "Realize we're all gonna die - so get the money" that instantly changes everything.  In the vein of mischevious fun and gangsta raps, the album houses the double-time masterpiece Audio X, the ghastly Steel Magnolia, the slightly pirate-themed 16 Men Till There's No Men Left ("Yo-ho ho and a bag of endo!"), the infectious Dead Men Tell No Tales that hooks the listener with its simple but hard-hitting melody... it is all just marvelous.

But one song, I saved for last.  One of the best songs ever written: Clash of the Titans.  Normally, that title would suggest some hip-hop rivalry, or a boast rap where the rapper proclaims himself a Titan, but B-Real chooses a different path.  With it's epic instrumentals, the repeating "Attention!" and the wordless chorus that only features disjointed whispers of "assassins"*, Clash of the Titans was epic on every scale imaginable.  Carrying the battle from the streets to the endless bloody fields, dispensing with the gats to make way for the sword, it is a work of genius and to me, one of the finest songs they have made.

Cypress Hill's IV, eventhough it inevitably recalls dark days with little sun and constant snow, has a special place in my heart.  This album is basically the reason why I got into the habit of collecting entire catalogues if I am invested enough.  As for the companion to this sentiment, that was their 2000 follow-up, Skull & Bones.

*Footnotes: 1- This consists of its predecessor, the 1995 III (Temples of Boom) which also featured the ghastly track Stoned Raiders, and of course, the monumental 2000 effort, Skull & Bones.
2- There are variants of this in the 2010 effort, Rise Up.  Doesn't work as well.
3- One of the best rap-metal hybrid songs in existence is on the successor of this album, and it takes its title from this song: it's Dust.
4- Referring to Cypress Hill's label, Soul Assassins.

Bratislava (Interlude)

So, picture this: a kid born and raised in Ankara, Turkey, who has had his fair share of bullshit from his peers.  That was me.  I'm not posing here to say "oh, woe is me." I never meshed, that was that.  I was into shit like Cypress Hill, most didn't understand it.  Some wondered why I didn't rap in my mother tongue when I wrote rhymes - forget the fact that Turkish is a more suitable language due to words being able to carry multiple meanings (sometimes up to five or six), and that suffixes are easy to rhyme, it just didn't carry what I was interested in.  The entire context of hip hop was missing, the context that even offshoots of it had.

In any case, my father had been working for the UNDP for a while then, and he managed to get himself a post in the Bratislava regional office.  I remember us talking about for a good long while, using the term "going international" for what he was doing.  He went on ahead to take a look, see what's what.

That was the beginning of a time I remember with fondness and a lack of desire to remember it at all.

See, what he did was, he stayed in the Danube Hotel (don't know if it's still there) and then told us he actually had seen what's what.  When tensions rose between my parents, we followed suit.  This was also influenced by the fact that my father had issued an ultimatum, that none of us wanted to call him out on.  So we went.

Disaster struck on our first night.  My mother somehow managed to acquire a tooth infection during a 2 hour flight, so bad that, while she did manage to get through dinner, she began throwing up.  So it was my sister and I in a hotel room, waiting for them to come back.  It was an era without cell phones, where internet was still in dial-up mode.  We turned on the TV to see if we could find something, but all the channels we found were either in German, which I spoke very little and my sister didn't at all, or Slovak, which we didn't speak at all (we just noted that it was a Slavic language, to be sure.)

Two things happened in that hotel room, staring at that T.V. One was that we came across a German-dubbed version of The Vision of Escaflowne, to this day one of the finest mecha anime I have ever watched*.  The second was that the video for Eminem's Lose Yourself was on.  That was an interesting moment for me - to see that he had elevated his game not with a baby step but with a flying leap.  Like a splash of cold water to the face: Em had grown, and he hadn't just grown, he was so sharp, it could cut armored cars in half.  This drilled into me right then and there a need to outperform myself constantly, or just not to drop below where the bar previously was.  Thanks, Slim.

We stayed in that hotel for about a month.  My mother, sister and I often went out during the day, to discover the city of Bratislava.  There was nothing.  Well, not nothing, to be sure, but nothing to appeal to us.  The European architecture that we had found so mesmerizing lost its allure quickly to the blistering cold and the awareness that you didn't speak the fucking language.

When my father finally found a home, we began to move in.  Moving day, I got to understand just how difficult it is to coordinate eight people who don't really speak the language into putting the right box in the right room.  With my mother sitting on a rather sturdy cardboard box with the entire manifest, with me constantly directing everyone around me, with my sister bored, and with my father pissed off for some reason, the day went by in a blur.  I supervised everything from the moving of those damn boxes to the installation of the IKEA-like furniture by the movers, who basically did a good job of putting up the basics, such as wardrobe doors, but in reverse position.

I wonder if they were more frustrated than I was.

When the night came, we were too tired to move.  So while my dad went out to get some pizza, hungry, cold and in a house with no electricity, my mother,sister and I slept on the unopened boxes stacked up in the living room.  I don't recall any food tasting better than that stale, cheese-only pizza I had that night, before or since then.

Then, it was time to get settled, get moving.

Since I was on my senior year before we had gone to Bratislava, and since my sister was five years younger than me, a school was found for the both of us.  The International Baccalaurate was picked out.  My sister would be learning Slovak.  I didn't have to, since education was done in English, but I was given a year to audit classes - responsible for the work, not getting graded for it.  This was all fine and dandy on paper.

On paper.

I hate the paper.  The paper's an asshole.

See, the weather in Bratislava was enough to drive any slightly unstable person to suicide.  Constant snow, sub-zero temperatures, insane wind, and very little daylight did not a pleasant experience make... I mean, not unless you were a gothic rock band, and I wasn't.

But regardless of the paper, it all went south pretty quickly.  Having never been outside of my birthplace, much less in a place where people from different walks of life, different cultures were, where the weather was basically either really cold or really hot, and the really hot didn't come around until summer, I found myself in situations and places I had never imagined I'd be in before.  Yes, it improved my writing as I obsessively wrote rhymes, trying to get better flow,better rhymes, better vocab.  Writing started to provide me with an escape.

Things deteriorated at home.  My parents were constsantly playing the escalation game.  My mother's dissatisfaction and depression was pitted against my father's seemingly endless rage and resentment, and my sister and I were caught in between.  My sister was never the sharing type, but during this time, she retreated into her shell and never quite came out again.  I was still a good long while from having my little psychosis come out in force, but the depression I had been wrongly diagnosed for at 14 was wearing me down.

Around this time, I would also meet someone who would influence me in more ways than I care to count.  She was the only other transfer student, except that she was a full-on student, not an auditor like me.  She wrote poetry.  I said I wrote raps, which counts as a form of poetry.  She wanted to read.  We compared notes.  Her writing, as well as other things about her, remained a significant element after that.  In the years to come, it turned out that we shared a dysfunction as well: she was bipolar, I knew, way before I found out that I was bipolar as well.  So different from me, yet much the same.  The time I spent in Bratislava and with her would later turn me towards poetry, proper, which would snowball into something similar but different.

So the time came and I decided that going to classes weren't compulsory (a running joke between one of my friends and I.) But there was enough bullshit going on at home that I didn't actually inform anyone of my newfound perspective on the nature of attendance.  The only place open from dawn to dusk in the school was the library.  Nobody cared at all what you were doing there, you could eat and drink all you liked, and there was no silence rule... just a "a little bit of hush hush, if you want." So I went there every day.  I had a corner, between a bookshelf full of Slovak translations of books, some of which I had read, and a waist-high cupboard.  There was a mat there, the kind you found in gyms, so I settled down, and I spent the day doing two things.  The first was writing, of course.

The second was listening to music.  I listened to any album that I had with me during the day, in between conversations with friends, and the occasional class I bothered to go to.  I kept listening on the trolleybus that I rode to get back home.  Since I didn't think to get more than one album with me lest my folks got suspicious, it was one cassette, which would be roughly 45 minutes long, for the entire day.

I had nothing else to get away.  Music gradually became a form of escape for me, in that when I put my earbuds in and pressed play, the world stopped being the dull, suicide-inducing prison cell with cheap wall insulation that let the wind through. It transformed into this beautiful, dark, twisted Wonderland* that shut everything I hated about it out.  Things moving "out there" stopped mattering, stopped being important.  Trivia, that was all the world was, but when I had music surging through me, I pressed my hand on the wall and felt the wind rushing through the cracks and the holes within, as if the air could actually caress my skin.  The dead, yellow lights of the library became luminous orbs, the worn-out books a gallery of decay and a special kind of dead.

Music got me out of my head.  That was the one place I needed to go in those days - out of my head.  Almost 18, in the grip of a difficult situation, feeling the early symptoms manifesting but without context, out of place and learning that I was just that, the outsider*.  Music became my shrine.

In many ways, Bratislava changed me.  Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, but regardless of which way any of me went, my love for music was to gradually take a different turn.

*Footnotes: 1- Of course, Neon Genesis Evangelion shares the top spot.
2- Around this time, upon discoverring fanfiction, I have also stumbled across the first version of Lani Lenore's legendary American McGee's Alice fanfiction, Behind Sanity.  Only then, her pen name was psychotic_butterfly.
3- This does read like posturing, but the outsider isn't the outcast.  There is a very real difference.

Cypress Hill - Stoned Raiders (2001)

So basically, way back when, I had of course heard the legendary single, Insane in the Brain (off of the excellent 1992 album, Black Sunday) by Cypress Hill.  I had largely forgotten about them while they were actually putting out some of the best albums of their career (which I'd later get to fall in love with), until one day, MTV happened to show the music video for the excellent genre-crossover Trouble.  Of course, I didn't know that Cypress Hill was no stranger to flirting with metal, and had forgotten what Cypress Hill was all about.  My conclusion that they were a rap metal band.  Since that happened to be my thing, I found an album of theirs and- oh.  Right.

See, back then, there was no such thing as "this particular album" of an artist.  It was whatever you could get your hands on.  There was a good selection available, don't get me wrong, but there were varying degrees of availability depending on how mainstream pop you were.  Further you were, the less chances you had of finding something.  On the flipside of this, there was a growing underground market for CDs gradually spreading, which I'd later benefit greatly from, but that is a story for a later time.

In either case, fortunately for me, Stoned Raiders was waiting for me in one of the stores I frequented.  I grabbed it.  It was to be another case of "first halfway run-through in the car." On a sunny day, headed out to an engagement party where the bride, I was informed, was getting married to a well-known mob boss' son.  The bride was a close friend of a friend of my mothers, whose son I had a sort of distant friendship with.  It was to be us, my sister's friends, and them.

Well, us, and Cypress Hill.

Trouble, I already knew, and was a pretty good opening track.  After all, it's blend of rap and metal was what had drawn me in, and B-Real's singing voice, the chorus of "Trouble's not my goal" was striking.  But when the next song, Kronologik came on, it started to dawn on me that I wasn't actually listening to a rap metal record like I had previously surmised.

Plus, Kronologik is exactly says on the tin - it's B-Real outlining the history of Cypress Hill, by then roughly a decade's worth (1991-2001.) It was a crash course for me then, to be introduced (again) to this crew and hear all about what happened, full of in-house references I wouldn't understand until I had gone through their entire discography.  It was followed by the gangsta tune with the brilliant sampled piano of Southland Killers.  I was pretty much interrupted then, as we had arrived.

The rest of the day went by with a preternatural awareness of the cassette in my walkman, the album that was still incomplete and waiting for me there.  Between games with my lil' sister and her friends, and discussing the finer points of shooting pigeons with air rifles with my own friends, I always kept the fact that I had Stoned Raiders by Cypress Hill waiting for me, in the back of my head.

Stoned Raiders is actually a pretty diverse album that blends together some of the crew's earlier material, lyrically and otherwise.  It plays to their strengths.  From the understandably bitter, well-worn tracks of Bitter and the rockin' It Ain't Easy; to the bittersweet, fun but still a bit blue Memories and L.I.F.E.; to the rock-like sound of Amplified and Catastrophe, neither of which had the punch of Trouble it offers many flavors.  There are also the gangsta tracks, such as Southland Killers, Here Is Something You Can't Understand* and to a lesser degree, Lowrider (this one also qualifies to be in the same mood as L.I.F.E. with the amusing vocals in the chorus) it's a Cypress Hill-fest.  Thing is, this album is easy to get into even without a firm grasp on all the references thrown out there.  Oh, and of course, coming from the lifelong advocates for the recreational use and legalization of marijuana, there is the bonus track, Weed Man.  Cypress Hill isn't Cypress Hill without weed.

 Stylistically, what also drew me to this album at the time was that what I would later term as my anti-classicist side*.  The only rapper I had been able to enjoy the stylings of had been Eminem and, to a lesser degree, D12.  To suddenly face the interesting, unique blend of Cypress Hill, with their own, distinctive style of rhyming (that I hadn't heard anywhere else), with B-Real's nasal voice* and tighter flow complemented by Sen Dog's more abrasive, basic and infinitely more posturing style, I was blown away.  To this day, I'm glad I picked up that album.

With good reason.

See, Cypress Hill had lightened up somewhat.  I didn't know this at the time, of course, but ten years into the game, without a hint of shame for being largely known by and still for a single they released in 1993, they had come to a point in their career where things were comfortable.  But even in this comfort, Cypress Hill had that little, very specific sort of darkness in them.  Moody tracks like Bitter and It Ain't Easy were both odes to betrayal, struggle and the white-knuckle-tight force needed to sustain it, to come out on top.  Even when mellow, they brought this feeling forward.  Lowrider may be fun, but the music behind the lyricism and the fun is decidedly a summer depression vibe.  Further, there were Memories and L.I.F.E., both decidedly bittersweet, both decidedly a bit more bitter than sweet, both mellow but at the same time, incredibly blue.

Thing is, Cypress Hill, I would learn, is about certain things.  It's about being a Latino in the slums.  It's about growing up a gangster.  It's about weed and smoking up.  It's about overcoming obstacles and getting revenge.  But more than any of those things, Cypress Hill is about the kind of darkness only 90's hip hop was capable of delivering, which they delivered in spades.  Cypress Hill didn't need to go full-on horrorcore* or posture to create that, even in 2001, it was still a part of them - which is why I loved them.

Stoned Raiders was my first time getting into an artist (in this case a crew) that had an extensive back catalogue.  The album I had was the latest in a long line, and if Kronologik was to be believed, I had to go back.  This started a trend in my musical discoveries that, if I happened to catch someone a lot of albums into their career, I gradually worked my way backwards.

So naturally, the next album should be the legendary 2000 effort, Skull & Bones, and though it was, a little interlude is necessary to set the stage for when music became everything.

*Footnote: 1- Here's where lack of knowledge becomes a handicap in an involved record like Stoned Raiders.  See, their 1991, self-titled debut had a song called How I Can Just Kill A Man, which is what this song references.  If you take the titles in reverse chronological order, you get the chorus of the first song.
2- It's just a fancy term I made up.  It just means that while I always have respected the pioneers and legends of any kind of music, I often do not enjoy listening to them all that much.  I have too many examples in that regard, so much so that in conversations, I tend to use the line "Just doesn't mesh with me" when people get offended.
3- In an interview, B-Real apparently said that he did that to make his voice more distinct, to make people recognize him whenever he came on.
4- A style of rap I had tried my hand in, which specializes in graphic depictions of violence often so over-the-top that it's fuckin' funny... if you have a sick sense of humor, that is.

Korn - Issues (1999)

My mother, when she used to work, had this friend whom had always said that had it not been for her, she would've quit two weeks in.  She had short-cropped hair, like my mother herself, and an air about her that made it basically impossible to not like her.  Her life's troubles she didn't hide, and although after a while, we didn't get to see her that often, one evening, she invited us over for dinner.  Incidentally, I had picked up Issues before coming home that day.  Without a choice in the matter, I got my trusty walkman to get a few tracks in on the way, as I had done with System of a Down's Toxicity.

Nowadays, I would never put on a new album unless I knew that I would have time to at least get to the last track, if not finish it entirely.  But back then, whatever I got in edgewise was a bonus.

So, let's not mince words: there's a reason why Falling Away from Me is arguably the biggest single of the band's career.  Especially after the boring intro of Dead, it's a breath of fresh air with its overall sickening mood, the anguished (if simple) lyrics, Jonathan Davis' impeccable delivery, and the way the song comes together to invoke a sense of darkness, no matter how simple or, to some, childish it may seem.  That's the moment Issues gets your attention, it's impossible not to.

Then again, there's no reason why the second track* Trash isn't the biggest single of the band's career.  I remember the scenery: the irregular trees planted into special gaps in the pavement going by, lights on in some homes, the dim street lights overhead illuminating nothing but their own bulbs, idle chatter in the background.  The air was damp, I recall.  The scent of fresh soil in the air - all the signs of summer rain.  All that, and the song.

No matter what the context, there is something about the mood prevalent in these kinds of songs, those who manage to settle in that place between melancholy, despair and pain, that take each notion beyond their usual status as accessories to songs* that always seduces me quickly and easily.  It doesn't really matter if the song is about the loss of a life, or a lover, if there is this, as it was said in one movie the name of which escapes me, "the void that drains away all life" then I am in love all over again.

Issues has its share of these kinds of songs.  Let's Get This Party Started, Falling Away From Me, Trash, and to a lesser degree, Hey Daddy or No Way.  Permeating these songs is an untouchable, inconsolable, absolute darkness and a clenched-teeth frustration mingling with despair.  Simple as though the actual source may be in these cases, the emotional charge is not negated by that.

But on a whole, Issues was rife with nausea, as the overall Korn sound always had that effect on me.  Harder in some parts, not so hard in others, it's definitely their definitive album.  I define that as: anything before is building up to it, anything after is an offshoot of it.  Issues is that.

Although it does commit the cardinal sin of having a pointless intro.  Although Dead was praised almost universally, I just never saw the point of having it there.  It's not like the interlude, 4 U, it's just meaninglessly out of touch with the rest of the album.  No rhyme or reason than to show off Jonathan Davis' bagpipe skillz.

As good as it was, though, Issues still had forgettable songs (virtually most of it.) Somebody Someone may be a biiig deal in general, but I found it boring.  Anything after Let's Get This Party Started just flew over my head every time.  This seems to be a problem in general - eventhough I tend to listen to albums start to finish anytime I'm listening to them, since I usually don't have a gap longer than 45 minutes in my time, anything after that mark is reserved for a later time.  But it wasn't that - it was just that the remaining 3 songs just weren't interesting.

I think it was around this time when I discovered that albums, songs or overall blend of instruments had colors attached to them.  Along with this, the semi-conscious association of songs to places, events or other contextual stimuli began to sink in.  See, I recall a bunch of songs, chiefly Make Me Bad, It's Gonna Go Away, Wake Up and Hey Daddy with a cerain rest stop on the road from Ankara to Datça.  Headed to my grandfather's summer home, about six hours or so in, there would be this place.  Since going with the day trip would be tantamount to suicide*, we'd stop there during the night, both ways.

I don't know what guided my hand to land these songs right near our arrival, but those songs are associated with that place - the smell of wet stone, mingling with slightly rusty copper cooking pots, white rice (pilav) cooked with a special kind of cheap and horrible butter (that I absolutely loved), water served in iron jugs, tea and imitation toys hanging behind the gift shop window, right next to magazines that were screaming some tabloid scandal or other... I miss that sometimes.  Barely conscious, insomnia taking over, everything would seem so bright, so much more defined than they normally would be, or even should be.*

As it happens, I would enjoy Issues for a further year or two, but post-Bratislava, my speed of musical discovery increased and my spectrum expanded pretty quickly, and though it remained in the same ballpark for a while yet, 2003 was it.  I have given it a cursory listen during the writing of this entry and, though better than the band's other releases, it's still so... I don't know.  I've forgotten most of it, so this would be an indication as to what I think of this one's longevity.

*Footnotes: 1- Whenever an album has an intro that is too boring, or too bad, or too insignificant to listen to, my brain does this re-arrangement trick and just erases it from the tracklist.  Back when I had my walkman, it was notoriously difficult to skip 'em, so I had started to have albums with boring intros forwarded on Side A to the first song.
2- Doom metal strives to exist in that strange limbo, but their preoccupation with it prevents it from being natural.  Years after this, The Foreshadowing's Days of Nothing (2007) would prove to be the epitome of that.  Especially with Escathon, but we'll get there.  Eventually.
3- There is a final, 2-hour stretch of the road that is basically a cliffside and a collection of pretty hard turns.  One wrong move, and you're good as dead.  Since the twists and turns also keeps you from seeing ahead of time if anybody's coming in from the opposite direction, it's basically leaving it up to God to just try and make it during the night... and God is often known for not caring about the small stuff.
4- I think this is just the brain.  Upon realizing that rest will not be coming anytime soon, it starts to run on automatic, trying to keep the body awake enough to avoid danger, sharpening your senses so that you'll se the predator coming... but killing your thoughts in the process.

D12 - Devil's Night (2001)

I had a close enough relationship with an honorary cousin* - we were often mistaken for brothers, so he had found it more convenient to say that we were cousins, rather than go through all the motions of saying "just friends." For the first, oh, I dunno, 18 years, he was a big part of my life.  His mother and my father had met on their first day in university* and over time, our parents had become very good friends.  It's all gone now, as nothing lasts.  But my cousin had a healthy interest in rap.  Through him, I had learned that there was a West Berlin school of Turkish rap, and that there were pretty quirky acts in the underground, trying to find their way.

As a somewhat mirror of me, he was calling himself MC Oksit (Oxide), was hanging out with breakdancers that gathered in a park near his house, and was writing rhymes in his mother tongue. He was a huge Eminem fan (who wasn't?), mostly because the guy he had bumped the cassette (Marshall Mathers LP) off of had also given him a bunch of other stuff*.  When I agreed to spend five days in his parents' summer home, I wasn't expecting to find a whole bunch of albums, some of which we had in common, some not... among them was D12's debut.

D12 is a rap crew (rap doesn't do "bands") composed of six individuals, each with a separate, second identity (a-la Slim Shady.) You have: Kuniva (Rondell Beene), Kon Artis (Denuan Porter), Bizarre (Peter S. Bizarre), Proof (Derty Harry), Swift (Swifty McVay) and Eminem (Slim Shady.) D12 is Eminem's old Detroit crew which also featured on Marshall Mathers LP on Under the Influence and the bonus track Shit On You; Bizarre was also on Amityville.  Produced by Eminem's new record label, Shady Records, this album looked like a beast.

Then I snuck off to listen to it in peace and got possessed.

Devil's Night was a darker album than Marshall Mathers LP, in that the darkness it chanelled made it known that although fun-loving on occasion, it was the product of six daemons who brought their best evil game and put it on tape. This is perhaps more apparent in the deranged, utterly psychopathic American Psycho* or the positively diabolical Devil's Night.  Other instances were more violent and supercharged, like the clenched-teeth, white-knuckle-tight-fist, top-of-my-lungs scream of Revelation, or the sharp-tongued Fight Music.  Other songs played the gangsta angle; from Swift's marvelous Instigator or the aptly-named Pistol Pistol were all school-of-hard-knocks tales of mayhem and shootings.

Mercifully, Devil's Night also has a playful side.  This is mainly the case whenever Bizarre appears, as he is sometimes so beyond over-the-top ridiculous with his rhymes that it's impossible to not laugh at what he's saying, even if it is sick beyond the telling of it.  But that requires a sick sense of humour in and of itself; otherwise, D12 know how to do upbeat, fun songs with lots of jokes.  From the party tune It Ain't Nuttin' But Music that pokes fun at concerned parents and contemporary scandals to the sexin' it up tune of Nasty Mind (helmed by Bizarre, of course) to the drug-addled Purple Pills overflowing with amusing rhymes about drug trips, the album has its fun along with the blood-soaked devilry.  This had struck me as being in line with the dual secret identities thing.  One one side, you have the first six, who are nasty assholes, but they know how to laugh.  On the other one, you have absolutely soulless daemons, here to paint the world red.

Speaking of which, this was also my first introduction to how rap crews worked; sort of like songs with guest features, but it wasn't just in the trading of verses.  Every personality came through loud and clear, bringing together a cohesive whole.  Slim Shady was the usual fanfare of nasty and fun-loving; Proof was a heavyweight, throwing punches and not afraid to get down and dirty; Swift was an Instigator, who also happens to spit one of my favourite lines on the entire album*; Kuniva was the street-hardened criminal who was a bit more mellow; Kon Artis was sharp as a razor, but more focused on having a good time and Bizarre... well, it's all in the name, isn't it? Even the Steve Berman skit, the follow-up of the one in Marshall Mathers LP had Steve asking Slim, "Who the fuck is Bizarre? Do you need a CAT scan? Where the fuck did you find this guy?"

There were, however, some points of divergence.  Blow My Buzz, as a party tune, doesn't really fit in anywhere on the album.  Oh it's all positively-charged and all that, but Devil's Night does it a few times before it gets to this track, and as such, it seems a bit excessive.  Secondly, Shit Can Happen and That's How are both sort of in between the other extremes, where the fun is not that fun and the sickness is not that sick.  They're imbued with a rather sickening overall mood, smeared with a blurry color palette, and if they weren't so good, I would count them as unnecessary.

The bonus track of Devil's Night was Girls, where Eminem was going on about a dispute I had only then heard from him: something about Limp Bizkit, and how Fred Durst had done him wrong.  This was sort of apparent, as there were several references to DJ Lethal, Fred Durst and Limp Bizkit throughout the album, but at the heart of it laid a rather small dispute that in the hip-hop world would indeed be cause for beef.  What I could gather was this: Eminem had, or was going to diss Everlast, and DJ Lethal would have appeared on the track.  Except he hadn't, and later he was on TV talking about how Everlast would kick Eminem's ass in a fight.  Things were made worse by Fred Durst who was supposed to back him, but didn't.

Girls was a mezmerising track, not because it was a diss, but because despite his general candid nature on a pad, I had never heard Eminem get down to something like this before.  I wasn't entirely a stranger to dissing, I knew the word and what it meant, but I hadn't actually heard an entire song based entirely on this.  The fine art of using the truth, the one side of the truth and nothing but was a new experience*.

But beyond all, Devil's Night gave me more drive to write.  To be better, to rhyme better, to go profound rather than shallowly dark.  It was a positively inspirational experience, and I still consider it one of my favourite albums.

The Summer of 2001 had another contender for that particular throne, a contender that'd later upstage itself with a member of its back catalogue.  It was time to legalize it, as I found an album I wasn't exactly looking for one day...

*Footnote: 1- Out of all the days of my 28-years-long life, I have seen my actual cousin on my mother's side for about a week, if even that.  Although elder relatives tend to insist, I consider him less than a stranger.  I don't value blood ties all that much.
2- The story goes that after the obligatory opening ceremony for freshmen, she and my father happened to coincide out in the hall.  They introduced themselves, and began to walk, chatting up a storm.  It was only when they came to an intersection that my father asked her where their auditorium was.  Her answer? "Didn't you know? I was following you, 'cause you looked like you knew!" Before my father could respond, someone interrupted them, "So neither of you know where to go? Great, then why the hell were we following you?" Twist: most of the freshman year had followed them.
3- Which included Nefret (Hatred - Ceza & Dr. Fuchs), Sagopa Kajmer, Silahsız Kuvvet (Unarmed Force) and the like.
4- Second favourite (set of) line(s) in this, by Kon Artis: "Being pressed caused the stress that caused the Ritalin / Pressed stressed and Ritalin caused the cop's feelings to be hurt / after they seen what I did to those children"
5- In an interview, Proof (R.I.P.) had said that he just didn't think there was any sense in trying to say it all proper-like.  In an age when everything in censored, he thought it was just appropriate that they take a word that would usually be bleeped out (shit) and put it right at the start.
6- "He blew his head back right in front of the prestinct like *boom* ya hear that?" During the Year in Bratislava, I wrote this down to say, "this is what I have on the mind right now" on a journal given to me by the school counselor.  Needless to say, there was a long talk about suicide a few days after I turned it in for a read-through.
7- One of the most famous disputes in hip-hop history is perhaps one between Cypress Hill and Ice Cube, based on whether or not Ice Cube had stolen the hook of Cypress Hill's Throw Your Set In the Air.  For anyone who wants to see how these things work between rappers (and not a rapper and a rap metal band), look it up.

System of a Down - Toxicity (2001)

The summer of 2001 was an interesting three months.  It was the prelude to a nine-months-long sojourn into Bratislava that still follows me and my family to this day, but I didn't know it just then.  My most distinctive impressions of this time relate to the albums that I heard, the artists that I discovered and what they would mean to me not too long after the fact.  It was also during this time that I learned about how memory could match certain times and places to whatever other stimulus is present at the time.  If ever there was purity in a summer, or if ever there was such a thing as the last summer of childhood, 2001 was it for me.

This is also aided by the fact that I was 15 now.  I don't know if it was this summer in particular, but in my mind, I will always be 15.  You know, that thing where you feel this or that age, depending on whatever age you feel you are on the inside.  I've always felt so young and so old at the same time.  Maybe it's the Gemini in me; whether you believe in horoscopes or not, I am very much dual-natured.  As such, I've felt this paradoxical state of youth and age, but looking back, I don't want to be 15 again - I just always will be.

Or maybe I'll always be 15.

In any case, one of the things I learned that summer was that having the same few songs and listening to them five hundred times in a row before getting the album could be detrimental to the experience.  I call this the Duality of Repetition; either the album is very good, and you mostly skip that song you used to love more than life, or the album is bad, and you just want anything before (or after) that song to cease to exist.  It's worse when the song in question is the last or the first song on the album.

Case in point: Chop Suey!

Arguably System of a Down's breakout hit, Chop Suey functioned on a whole different level to what I was used to.  It wasn't the relative filthiness of the sound, or not only that, but the distinctive vocal delivery and (and somewhat profound) strange lyrics impressed, to be sure, but not as much as the punch the music packed.  To alternate between teeth-grinding passages and the instant earworm chorus had blown me away.  Thing is, I had actually come in very near the end of the music video, so I hadn't even heard the whole song, just the bridge and the last chorus, and I was lucky enough to see who this was.

I managed to get the album right before an evening out with the family, which was spent mostly with twirling the cassette in my hands.  I first cracked it open in the car, on the way back - forget the ritual, I just couldn't wait.

Prison Song kicked my teeth in and I had fallen for it, and then I was in for the ride.

The music of System of a Down had struck me as being very peculiar and very particular, in that their concern with the harmonious, the focused was balanced with their tendency to go mindlessly all out (Needles is a good example.) Serj Tankian's rather blunt vocal delivery; John Dolmayan's simple-sounding-but-rather-complex drumming and particular sense of rhythm; the rather basic but very effective guitar work of Daron Malakian and his added vocals; and the Thunderbird* stylings of Shavo Odadjian come together in a peculiar-but-particular blend.

Lyrically, System of a Down was weird.  For someone like me, whom had been interested in lyricism from roughly the first days of the 2000 Brigade, to encounter something as whacked as the lines Serj Tankian was spouting was like a splash of cold water to the face.  It took a bit of interpretation, and was my first inclination that perhaps it was not what you were saying, but how you were not saying that.  Songs like X or Bounce or even rather simple ones such as Deer Dance required more than just listening to what was being said.  The surreality of it, the paradoxical removal of sense to inject more sense was mesmerizing.

Unfortunately, however, in later years, System of a Down turned out to be rather... vapid, for me.  Even going over it recently to refresh my memory, I can hear riffs I've heard elsewhere a dozen times over, the lyrics are needlessly preoccupied with obfuscation, and I really do not like my music mixed with politics, at least not to the degree that System of a Down flaunted it.  I do recall a handful of songs, however, and they are: Aerials, Chop Suey!, ATWA and the unforettable Needles.

Things change, I suppose.

*Footnote: 1- The Gibson Thunderbird is a fucking heavy bass; it's thick, filthy, and defines "low end." Nikki Sixxx has a signature model that is pretty sweet, as well.  Thing is, you'd think the Thunderbird would get more love from the stoner community, but no, they all want Rickenbacker 4003's, also a favourite of Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead.

Eminem - Slim Shady LP (1999 - Tangent)

History also says that Eminem's breakout hit was his 1999 single, My Name Is, which, like its title, served as his introduction to the world.  This would be followed by the magnificent rap duet of Guilty Conscience, where Eminem played the devil on the shoulder while Dr. Dre played the angel (with a twist, of course.) Another, this time less known (or, at the time and where I was, basically unknown) single to come out of the same source was Just Don't Give a Fuck; however, as an entry in the encyclopedia of context that was entirely lost on me, Bad Meets Evil, a track that featured Royce da 5'9'', which was also the beginning of their collaboration.

I had two songs from my trusty little website, two days' relative labor to bring me Guilty Conscience and Just Don't Give a Fuck.  Having fallen in love with what I could make of Marshall Mathers LP, it didn't take me too long to track down its predecessor.  It was easy, I just had to go to the cassette rack, find the letter E, and then search for something Eminem that wasn't the album that I had listened to death.  Of course locating it proved to be a bit more difficult than that, because, who the hell cared about another album? I finally lucked out and brought the cassette home.

Now, Slim Shady LP was a different beast.  If then I had to label the two albums that I had, I'd say that this was Eminem as an adolescent, whereas the later album was Eminem as an early adult (I'd say, early-to mid-twenties.) His voice was a bit... I don't know, mousier, I guess.  His flows were there, and his insane storytelling was present, but the heavier rhyme schemes I was used to were largely absent*.  The production was decidedly thinner, in fact, I was kind of bothered that any sound effects that would be used were done by Em himself, the timbre of his voice helping me identify that.  It was a bit less filtered, a bit less concerned with clarity... but Slim Shady, through and through.

Some of Eminem's fixations are well-documented, but to me, they were new.  Especially after being roughed up by the lethality of Kim, I was surprised to find the sequel, '97 Bonnie & Clyde.  I had some vague idea of who Bonnie & Clyde were at the time, but beyond that they were lovers, and somehow associated with Thelma & Louise*, I didn't know anything. However, the song itself was like being doused with cold water, especially with the way Eminem was explaining to his daughter that her mother was gone before dumping the body in the lake with her... sick? Definitely, but I think it related to the fact that I was good with children, and still am, and that a child's mind can easily be manipulated if you know how it works.

Slim Shady LP spoke to me in ways its successor had not.  It related to my perceptions of myself and some of my daily experiences with Brain Damage. It had me laughing my head off at the sick humour of My Fault.  With that song, I was meeting head-on, perhaps for the first time, a storyline that I would see in many forms and love: a descent into insanity.  After all, Susan's predicament (an accidental mushroom overdose) and the way Slim full-on panics, but still asks their provider-friend Dave how long the 'shrooms will take to wear off, 'cause he's hoping that she'll get over it by the end of spring break* was absolutely hilarious.  The lunacy of Just Don't Give a Fuck made my smile, and I remember wondering if that was a sentiment I should start applying to my life.  The insanity of As the World Turns and the stranger-than-fiction tale told within blew me away.

Of course, it's not all fun and games, and with Slim Shady, I had found out, to have the fun, you had to be sick in the head.  You had to laugh at something you would normally never consider funny because of the way it was put.  It was a very George Carlin thing to do, come to think of it, but the practice of pitch-black humor and the sickness of it, I always found appealing.  That was clearer in the skits, which also featured my favourite homosexual pervert/prank caller, a character that'd appear in more skits, Ken Kaniff.  Paul Rosenberg, Eminem's producer, also had his own skit.  These, and the soap opera skit before As the World Turns spiced it up - not everyone can do good skits on their albums.

But there are darker moments.  Still Don't Give a Fuck, the sort-of continuation of the earlier track is decidedly dark, bitter and venomous - if its first part was based on an almost comical carelessness, this track is pure anger.  Rock Bottom was exactly what it said on the tin, and I felt like I had been there... except I really hadn't.  If I Had had the perfect line, "What's life? I'm tired of life." My thoughts, exactly, and even though not everything in there was a condition I was facing, I could still understand, and thus accept.  '97 Bonnie & Clyde is a sickening father-daughter bonding road trip, ending with the corpse being dumped in a lake and Slim Shady taking his daughter away from it all.  Uncertain future, the weight of the crime, the thought that this little girl had actually processed everything and how it would affect her weighed heavy.

This album concludes the 2000 Brigade.

*Footnotes: 1- I've always felt that to be able to carry a rhyme efficiently throughout a verse, or, in some cases, throughout entire songs was admirable; also, heavy rhyme-schemes depending on multis and wordplay also tickled my fancy.  Slim Shady LP is a bit different in this regard.
2- Of course the 'such-and-such' is a trope, and at the time, the most I could have associated it with was the 1989 Sylvester Stallone & Kurt Russell movie, Tango & Cash.  Fun flick, that.
3- We don't have Spring Break in Turkey, so I didn't exactly know what that was.  We did have one-day holidays for national occasions, plus two religious holidays that may take the whole week if we, the students, lucked out.

Limp Bizkit - Significant Other (1999 - Tangent)

History says that Nookie, off of Significant Other was Limp Bizkit's breakout hit.  Depicting a Rage Against the Machine-style unauthorized street gig in its video, the song itself, while not containing the final word of its legendary chorus line ("So you can take that cookie and stick it up your-") was often censored.  Yes, the censors were keeping a trademark Fred Durst "Yeah!" from being heard.  Representative of the very late 90's and very early 2000's music, an epitome of all Limp Bizkit was in its cover, Significant Other is considered to be the Limp Bizkit album.

Also, Significant Other was one of the two albums I had gotten my hands onto because of a tendency that would later cause an unending album list that I've been trying to get through for the past ten or so years.  I am a naturally curious guy, so much so that it's often seen as being nosy.  It was my curiosity about a reference to one band that had gotten me to Korn, and that curiosity was just beginning to give me a workout.  It was established by then that I loved Limp Bizkit, and I had two albums, but I knew there was a third one, before Chocolate Starfish.  Since they weren't going to release a fourth fast enough for me, I decided to go back once again.

Significant Other is a different beast than its predecessor and successor.  It is a statement by the band that they are here to stay, and is a tour-de-force.  Although, to me, not better than Three Dollar Bill, Y'all$, it is one of their best efforts, and one of the most significant albums of its time.  The sound is more refined, its rougher edges trimmed to accomodate the shift, its glossier and clearer.  Wes Borland, Sam Rivers, John Otto, DJ Lethal, they all bring it, and Fred Durst ups his game.  But it wasn't just the cleaner production, the fact that there were more songs this time around, guest appearances that spiced it up (Aaron Lewis of Staind, Jonathan Davis of Korn, Method Man.) It was something quite else.

See, in a way, Significant Other is darker than its predecessor and its successor both.  It was more depressing, and this time sparing some space for autumn or rainy evenings.  I'm Broke may have been a song about money troubles, but was bitter.  No Sex, I couldn't even relate to, as I hadn't had any just yet (and wouldn't for years to come), but the messy room, tangled up bedsheets, forgotten cigarette burning in the ashtray imagery of it blew me away.  The Jonathan Davis spot of Nobody Like You was a tale of betrayal, and the delicious melodies brought on, that legendary chorus ("I've got a reason and I want to know") always got me where it hurts.  A Lesson Learned is a lament if there ever was one.  Hell, even Nookie isn't that much fun and games once you hear the creeping angst under the surface.

But two tracks take the cake with this one.  They were both on Side A of my cassette version.  The first was Don't Go Off Wandering.  This one was especially potent not only because of the darker tones captured with its chorus, or the way Fred sang the words ("You don't feel nothin' at all").  It was the verses.  Because in a way, I was a hopeless dreamer stuck in an adolescence I didn't understand or want.  The real world was too unfair, I guess, it seemed.  "Maybe there's more to life than it seems / I'm constantly running from reality / chasing dreams." I was.

The second such track was Rearranged.  Never mind that it was sort of quiet, laid-back, and a relationship song to boot, it was so deliciously sad, so eager to introduce me to a knot in my chest that I couldn't get enough.  The bridge was where it all went down, and since I didn't have the lyrics, I even misheard a line that got to me: "You think that everybody is a saint / I don't think that anybody is like you." Of course, context makes the actual line, "...that everybody is the same" fall into place, but in my head, the lines made perfect sense in isolation.

Within the context of the song, they made even greater sense.  I thought it was sung by a sinner, a monster that I perceived myself to be for the longest time - he had encountered a saint, someone whom had seen him, and accepted him as he was.  But he couldn't take that, he couldn't handle it.  The goodness, it was too much for him, so he rejected it, he said no.  Interesting that even then I thought misery was sometimes too comfortable to give up, and acceptance so alien that it would be unbearable.  I would shed this thought later in my life, but it took a lot to realize it fully.

What makes Significant Other fall short of being perfect is that there are feel-good songs in the album that both disrupt the flow* and serve no purpose.  Those were Just Like This, 9 Teen 90 Nine and Show Me What You Got.  Amidst hard-hitting hits like Trust? or No Sex or even the brainless, mind-numbing but undoubtedly fun Break Stuff* (which also had an anime AMV), these songs had no place and felt like they belonged to the scrap heap, perhaps to be released in a rarities compilation at a later date.  They don't hit as hard, they don't carry the mood, they're just sort of... there.  Softer and somehow seeming more radio-friendly, these bring the album down.

But despite its flaws, and despite how dated it might seem, Significant Other is a 2000 Brigader that is still enjoyable and fun.  Limp Bizkit would veer towards a weird direction in later years, never quite capturing the spark they had with their first two releases, but they would leave behind an interesting legacy.

The other tangent in the 2000 Brigade belonged to my favourite rapper, and for different reasons, obviously.

*Footnotes: 1- An album's flow was something I was beginning to grasp - that it had to go from song to song without odd ones out, or moments that would be breaks from the album's otherwise cohesive structure.
2- Break Stuff's video, along with many others, was parodied by Bowling for Soup in their video for Girl All the Bad Guys Want (off of Drunk Enough to Dance, 2002.) In the video, however, unexpectedly, Slipknot shows up, bottles the Fred Drust and then proceeds to stomp on him.  The video itself is hilarious, by the way.

Korn - Follow the Leader (1998)

"I'm torn like Korn playin' 'Follow the Leader'" is a CrazyTown line that I would hear during the Bratislava years.  How odd, I remember thinking, I don't remember thinking that that album was particularly torn.  It was something else, that's for sure, but torn? No.

Follow the Leader was the last member of the 2000 brigade, and the one I got to last.  Because I didn't even know this band even existed, it was hearsay in a music magazine I was picking up every month, but I hadn't seen or heard them... no songs on the internet either.  No information besides liner notes in Limp Bizkit's Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Falvored Water, which gave the band a mention, and a throwaway line in Indigo Flow.  From what little I could piece together (yes, the internet was still taking baby turtle steps), this Korn was connected deeply to Limp Bizkit.  Further reading on the subject, courtesy of magazines borrowed from friends, said that whoever this band was, they had been the ones who made Limp Bizkit famous*.

It was a stroke of luck that it wasn't Issues (1999) that got into my hands first, mainly because I had, oddly enough, heard more praise for Follow the Leader from the scant few people I had heard it from.  So I was stuck with what I was stuck with, but Fred Durst was there to sweeten the deal for me with the track All In the Family.

Upon first listen, I failed to see what the hype was all about.  Until that point, I had been used to jumpy, hard pounding, upper-mid tempo tracks, a lot of rapping, perhaps some screams here and there, but all done in a certain rock/metal-like style.  If Papa Roach was like punk, and Linkin Park was like rock, and Limp Bizkit was like a super-charged hip-hop, the likes of which I'd see again*... but Korn was a different blend.  It was crunchier, heavier, fuzzier, slower, more metal in its execution than the ones I had seen before.  Jonathan Davis didn't rap, he sung, and the things he did with his voice were strange and unusual in the Beetlejuice sense.  Fieldy's slap bass was a noise I was not familiar with, especially with the way he used it.

At the heart of Follow the Leader is a groove I can't quite put the words.  Perhaps it's that their music was a bit more complex than what I was used to, owing much to the dynamic relationship between Munky and Head, and the fact that David Silvera, while prone to it, was a much more rock-oriented drummer.  The moods they put forward made my nauseous at the time, especially with Jonathan Davis' vocalizations: that he used his own crooning voice as instruments to add to choruses was a new idea for me.

At first, I didn't like it at all.  But there were interesting songs - the groovy It's On, the harder Dead Bodies Everywhere (more my "style"), the unexpected Reclaim My Place with it's addictive main riff*; or the bleaker, emptier, summer depression of Got the Life, the nausea-inducing spiral of B.B.K., the sickening Pretty, which was downfilled, depressive, violent but of course, utterly beautiful for all these things.

But perhaps the most stand-out, enhanced by the presence of my then-fashion icon, was All In the Family.  It wasn't just the weird, saw-like riff, the grumbling bass, the simpler riff, the lapse into full-blown hip-hop during Fred Durst's verses, or the heavier, darker, sicker verses spat by Jonathan Davis, all coming together in an apocalyptic ("Because it's doomsday, kid, it's doomsday"), playground-battlefield style direct trading of sentiments ("I hate you!") was simply delectable.  Of course, the homoerotic conclusion, I never saw coming.  I remember laughing out loud even after the track was done, what a twist!

The bigger twist however, was leaving the tape running with my headphones on after Side B was done and getting hit in the face with a hidden track, the name of which I couldn't find in the cassette booklet.  I didn't know just what the hell this rockin' riff set to a weird, unfamiliar (possibly guest, I thought) vocals telling the story of a kid who wanted desperately to crossdress against his mother's protestations - perhaps he was transsexual, but I got the impression that he was doing it for the hell of it.  Then the kid became a rockstar, got rich, owned stocks and all that shit near the end of the world, and then the riff slowed down... first gradually, and then to an unforgettable snail's pace. I listened to it five, six times in a row, I was blown away - this was so weird, so insane, so quirky that I was stuck.  What the hell was this?

Well whatever it was, it was easily the best song on the whole damn album.  Years later, I would learn that the song was called Earache My Eye and was a Cheech Marin cover.  Live and learn, but this was the first instance of my bad track record with knowing or detecting cover songs.

Follow the Leader was also an album true to its cover - sickly greens and browns, something childish but unkempt, deadly like a game of hopscotch right at the edge of a cliff.  And it is decidedly either a spring or summer album.

Unfortunately, my Korn tangent came full circle, and I don't think Follow the Leader or any Korn album for that matter, aged well.  They kind of didn't.  But back then, it was another name on the list that piqued my interest - if they could pull off Earache My Eye, what else was out there?

*Footnotes: 1- This "helping someone blow up" thing would also appear later with Staind, about whom Fred Durst had remarked, according to a magazine article about nu-metal, "they don't seem to remember us." I would learn years later when I got a bit into Staind that Aaron Lewis would do supporting vocals on the song No Sex on their legendary/breakout album Significant Other (1999.) See next entry.
2- Which was Cypress Hill's 2001 single Trouble from the album Stoned Raiders.
3- It's very highly debatable if nu-metal power chord variations could be called riffs, but at the time, I thought they undisputably were, so I'm keeping it like that.

Papa Roach - Infest (2000)

Viva la cucaracha!

Actually, no, wait, no, fuck that.  I hate cockroaches.  Mostly because after my grandmother's death, we had started spending the summers, about a month's worth of 'em anyway, with my grandfather at his house in Datça.  The other reason was that as I was going to a private school, so would my sister, as our parents never did something for one that they didn't do for the other, and we were barely scraping by as a result.  It was free accomodation, and the most distinctive quality of the once-pristine beach (spitting distance from the house, sand nice and white) was the presence of cockroaches.

I don't like insects, but cockroaches are a different kind of horror altogether.  And Datça was a haven for those suckers - worse still, the source of the neverending barrage of cockroaches was a storm drain near a neighbor's garden, and he refused to have the garden disturbed to take care of what actually was a sanitation problem.  My grandfather didn't help.  He was an entomologist, a legendary professor in Turkey, and he held nothing but fascination for those infernal things.  Sure, he took care of one if we screamed for him to do so, bless his heart, but ultimately, he rarely ever saw insects as we did.

The house is gone now, sold after my grandfather's Parkinson's and dementia began to pick up speed, but I remember turning it into a game - we would bet on how many days it'd be before we got scared shitless by a cockroach.

How is all this relevant? For one, the album I am about to talk about was one of my favourite things that summer, in part because I discovered with it that albums can have seasons.  It's kind of like synesthesia with me, just not the whole nine: albums can have seasons, or times of day.  Instruments or songs can have colours*.

So colour me surprised when I laid down on my bed, put the headphones on, got the cassette booklet, and ran through it.  That's how Papa Roach's Infest got me shouting for something I would sooner kill than celebrate.

Of course, they were somewhat familiar.  Wherever I had gotten my information from (I don't recall), I had downloaded an mp3 of Last Resort and had loved it.  But the full experience of Infest was something else.  There was something very dirty about it, and not just the cover - the sound was dirty.  The album felt like picking dirt from between my teeth.  Polished, but still maintaining a garage aesthetic at times, the sound itself was like a punch to the gut delivered on demand: painful, but you asked for it.  Consider the tamer songs like Binge, Between Angels & Insects, or Tightrope, and they were slower, but no less punchier.  Of course my favourites were the harder and faster numbers like Infest, Thrown Away, Snakes, Blood Brothers or Dead Cell.  Snakes was so badass at the time that it was my second favourite.

My first? Why, Revenge, of course.  From its opening hit, the guitars during the verse, the way the chorus seemed to confirm my own theory on love ("can't live with, or without"), to the pure hip-hop bridge... but the lyrics got it.  The destructive force of love, expressed in the violent revenge of a domestic abuse victim, likening her to a Godzilla-like behemoth that, in my mind, was preparing to devour New York.  From the depths of the ocean to the concrete kingdom, in pain and hungry to inflict it.

I might add that Thrown Away set my standard for "going out with a bang." If you're not gonna go out on a somber note, then wreck your shit on your way out.

Coby Dick* was a big factor in me digging this.  As an aspiring rapper/lyricist*, I was impressed by his delivery, his rhymes and his in-your-face, vicious punches.  Pick a song, any song, and there's at least one quotable.  Perhaps my favourite was Blood Brothers, where the chorus kept moving from periphery to center, just to say "It's in our nature to kill." Then again, Dead Cell's "Plug 'em in and then turn 'em on - process the data, make yourself the bomb" always conjured up the image of a cyborg suicide bomber.  How appropriate, as I was no stranger to suicide bombings, terrorism, or science fiction.  But it also spoke to something else in me, the feeling that as I processed more data, learned more, observed more, I was getting more irritable (yes, that wasn't because I was a hotheaded teen, exactly, but I didn't know that then.) I was like that, "He don't know what he's doing, he just keeps getting by."

Besides which, Broken Home was a masterpiece in my view, especially the ping-pong delay guitar bit that kicks it off, its lonely-but-furious-about-it attitude... everythin. While I didn't learn what the title meant until the Bratislava years, having witnessed some inter-parent conflicts, I carried sentiments similar to those in the song (I hadn't seen nothin' yet.)

I perceived my father as cold and distant, not abusive as Coby Dick depicts it (perhaps not explicitly, but it's heavily implied.), but generally absent and uncaring.  It wasn't grounded in observation, to be sure, but what the hell did I know?

Infest is another member of the 2000 brigade that has stood up to the test of time, in that, if I listen to it today, and I did while writing this, I can still derive the same amount of enjoyment from it as I did the first few hundred times around.

*Footnote: 1-Recently, while trying to compose a song, I kept thinking with every VST preset I tried that the lead I was looking for had to be "greener" or "a bit less green" than the ones I was trying, one after the other.  I found it, and it was similar to one I had used in another song, which was a sort of aquamarine blue-green.
2- Why the fuck he dropped this name I never understood.  Although Jacoby Shaddix is
3- It never became more than that aspiration, mainly because I began writing not to make it into a song or anything, but to have written it.  Writing for myself didn't mean that I wasn't a lyricist - I just had no songs to put 'em on, which, to me, is not that big a deficit.

Linkin Park - Hybrid Theory (2000)

So the year was still 2000, and nu-metal was this big thing, except I didn't even know the term.  I had what I had, and I regularly tuned into MTV, and the Turkish cousin (Number 1MTV) to catch music videos of my then-favourite artists.  It was around that time that a pestilence began to appear on the TV in our living room - some spikey-haired blonde asshole and a dude with a guitar who also sung, or sort of just spoke in the in between the singing.  They had other guys, they were all wearing black, the video seemed to be about domestic abuse, and I hated it.

Why? Well, I hadn't really listened to it, see.  I just didn't like it because it was everywhere.  I would call myself an anti-populist at the time, even though I was actually listening to what was very popular... just popular elsewhere.

When I did, Crawling made a big impact.  This was way darker than anything I had in my hands at the time, and yes it was simple, but the delivery was fucking excellent.  The lyrics were also easily relatable, "Confusing what is real" sounded like actually taken from the notes of my first psychologist*.

Of course, I had these thoughts while I was at a friend's place - she was the daughter of a family friend (our fathers were childhood buddies), and she was into this Linkin Park or whatever they were called.  We "lucked out" and caught Crawling on the TV, but what we hadn't noticed, was that her mother had actually come in to tell us that the tea was ready, and seen us transfixed, so she had just stood there.  When the song ended, she announced her presence with a comment: "This type of music just tires me out nowadays.  I think I'm getting old."

So one day, with the album added to her list, my mother returned with Hybrid Theory and two others.  Hybrid Theory had the distinction of not coming with a parental advisory sticker, which intrigued me, as I had come to regard that sticker as a sign that said, "BUY THIS." That sticker meant that any album cover it tarnished hid an album that had a very real chance of being incredible.

Anyway.  As it so happened, the lightbulb in my room went out, and all I had was the dim lights of my table lamp, but since the cassette was one of those that didn't have the lyrics included, I just closed my door, drew the curtains as I was afraid of the dark, stuck it in and hit 'play.'

Nothing was the same after that.

The paranoid, twitchy, madness-inducing, under-my-skin shock of Papercut, triggering visions of a nightmarish body horror face growing out of my arms sent me into a place I didn't know existed.  I had just struck gold.  Was it the atmosphere of the opener, the dream-like verses of With You*, or the playful rhythm of A Place for My Head? The wet-concrete and chainlink fence imagery of Runaway and the sentiment, I could relate to; Pushing Me Away was every adolescent half-infatuation; In the End was the idea I was entertaining at the time, while wondering how I would commit suicide - that none of the vast number of things mattered at all*.  Points of Authority was rebellion for me, but I was too stubborn to forfeit the game.  Let them put my name to shame, I didn't have the former to begin with, and shame, I lived with every day.

Or was it maybe the enduring truth of By Myself? "I ask why, but in my mind, I find (that) I can't rely on myself."

It wasn't just that Hybrid Theory came from a place that I was lost in at the time.  It's because Hybrid Theory is still a damn good album.  Chester Bennington's unique and powerful voice carried a high emotional charge; Mike Shinoda's lyrics and delivery are both impeccable - some of the basic but effective lines he spits are endlessly quotable and can be quite profound.  The most problem metalheads at the time had with these new bands was not in any of those.  See, if I had to term it as I termed it then, metal is primarily melodic.  The riffs, the solos, they're all far more complex than the average Linkin Park song; by contrast, Linkin Park's music is rhythmic more than anything.  That's what allows the hip hop angle to creep in - I don't think many cared all that much for Joe Hahn's turntables, more that it featured very little chord progression or variety.

But that was just it, see.  Linkin Park, and Hybrid Theory needed it not.  Sure, it's basic to me now, after I've branched out very far from its near vicinity, but the album had everything I wanted at the time, things I didn't know they did in these things, and a healthy dose of relatable lyrics.  Sure, it might seem juvenile, but some of the sentiments expressed are universal enough that one can find oneself in them.  The chorus of Runaway is a testament to that.  Speaking of which, this album was the one that I had decided had the quintessential "closer."

Pushing Me Away is that song.  It has that undertone of finality, the bitterness of having to say goodbye to something so captivating and, if you were so inclined, so warm and comfortable.  That small pain in your chest at the thought of leaving it behind, of going away.  Ever since Hybrid Theory, that has been how I perceived good closers to be: glorious, but painful just the same.

As I said in the beginning, Hybrid Theory came bundled with a few more items, one of which had to do with an insect type I have nothing but contempt for... cockroaches.

*Footnotes: 1- I lost my grandmother when I was 13 or 14 (never kept track, because she's gone and that's just that), and having never met something like death, I first became fascinated with the subject, and then, perhaps due to the trouble I was having at school, perhaps apart from it, developed suicidal ideations that continue to this day.  I was diagnosed major depressive, which would later be revised to bipolar I once I was over 21.
2- While "My December" was the one that I couldn't listen to as it hurt just too much, "With You" still haunts me to this day.  Perhaps because I associated it with a recurring dream of mine where, wearing all white, I float in the air in a vast room.  There's a cube in the middle of the room, just rotating, and it looks small, but I know it's huge.  I have the urge to drift towards the cube, and run my finger along the length of an edge, corner to corner.  I know that when I do that, I will feel sick inside, a type of throat-to-intestine nausea will come over me, but I do it anyway, and then I float around the cube, under it, touching its edges, feeling sicker and sicker and sicker every time... this dream stopped about three years ago.
3- Yes, that's not what the song is about.  But it was, back then.

Limp Bizkit - Three Dollar Bill, Y'all$ (1997 - Tangent)

Limp Bizkit would also start off a little DIY project.  I have a knack for bringing different elements together, and I love puzzles, and it helped me a lot over the years, and this time was not an exception.

So the story goes: I had gotten a small sound system, I guess the term would be, for either my birthday, or a religious holiday, I don't really recall.  This sucker had a slot for a cassette tape, and a CD player, two fuck-me speakers and a bass boost that I turned off in no time at all.  It also had a headphone extension, which I used sometimes to listen to Phil Collins' Another Day in Paradise to cry when I couldn't sleep (a tradition that lives on, albeit with different music.) This was actually before I had gotten Ride the Lightning, but in any case.

I was collecting cassettes at this time, as CD's were too expensive.  I didn't have the money to buy a discman, and a walkman was much more portable anyway.  When the same mp3 site I'd been using clued me into a song called Pollution by one of my favourite bands at the time, I happened to talk to a schoolmate about it.  He was strange, in that I never knew if we were friends or if we were enemies, or if I hurt him too much.  He had been one of the scant few, and mostly innocent, targets of my rare and rather apathetic actions, but he was alright, and he loved Bizkit much as I did.  He told me that he actually had their first album on tape, but it was impossible now, it was all CD's.

I don't know how many stores I went to.  I remember losing my patience at the end of a very long day of bus rides, exhausting every possibility, and snapping: "No, I need this on a cassette, god damn it, I need it on motherfucking cassette!"

But no.  CD's everywhere.  This would, in later years, translate to "digital downloads everywhere." Some things never change.

Begrudgingly, I bought the CD.  I spun it a couple of times, and it was pretty damn good, but I couldn't take it with me! Then a little "record" button on the tape player's row caught my attention.  I bought an empty tape, popped it in, put the CD on, and transferred it.  I emptied out the only Backstreet Boys album I had (yeah, I had one, if you must know.) Now for the sleeve... I had a scanner and a printer, both came in handy in creating a low-quality sleeve cut out of A4 paper, the track names written in Times New Roman on the inside of it, and I had my cassette copy of Three Dollar Bill, Y'all$.  I was proud of myself.  Alright, so it wasn't an official copy, but what could I have done? I had worked with the materials I had been given.

Now almost twenty years after the fact, Three Dollar Bill, Yall$ is, to me, the best album Limp Bizkit has ever recorded.  Significant Other (1999) is a very close second, but one thing it isn't, is perfect.  Three Dollar Bill, Y'all$ is perfect.  The first thing I had noticed, even with Pollution was how raw it was, how much force was crammed into it.  That's the thing, really, as this album isn't just Limp Bizkit's breakout (as arguably, Significant Other was what made them), it's also one of their hardest, most versatile albums.  It's darker than its successors, it's harder, it has more of the downer moments that I adore(d.)

Yes, even when they are over-the-top enough to be tongue-in-cheek.

I mean, how else can I term songs like Sour, Clunk, Nobody Loves Me or even better, Indigo Flow, which is a tribute song, a shout-out song but manages to cram that special kind of dark into it? Or one of the best renditions of George Michael's Faith ever recorded? But it wasn't all just that, because the (to me) experimental Counterfeit, the breathless Pollution, the mid-tempo but plenty groovy Stuck and the white-knuckle tight Leech brought different flavours, different moods.  It's perhaps before the band and, more like Fred, began to enjoy their fame a bit too much, because there is something very punk about it all.  Very fuck-it, very our-own-rules, which makes it all the more special.

Thing is, maybe a year after the fact, I would discover another* one of those anime AMV's which were the first examples of memes.  It was Limp Bizkit's version of Faith set to scenes from one of my favourite animes, Golden Boy.  This was during the Bratislava years, and the CD that held this little AMV also housed what has been, ever since I watched it, my favourite movie of all time - Ghost in the Shell.  But that'll be mentioned in its own separate entry.

For now, there is still the not-so small matter of the rest of the 2000 brigade.  I'm thinking, a band that I had done everything I could to avoid at first, because their music video was everywhere, all the time, and I just hadn't found it all that amazing... yet.

I'm talking about Super Xero of course.

*Footnotes: 1- The first is of course the Final Fantasy IV-VIII compilation AMV set to The Offspring's Staring at the Sun.  It had come out of a demo CD that a monthly gaming magazine I bought every month gave with every issue.

Limp Bizkit - Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water (2000)

So imagine watching MTV one day, perchance to run into something nice, and suddenly, this... thing... comes on.  It's so expletive-ridden that it's almost halfway gone to the silent-censors.  But it's pounding, it's energetic, it's the type of guys you're used to seeing now, on top of a skyscraper, and the song is (to put it in the vernacular) bangin' to the fullest extent of it.  It's an earworm, and it's stuck in your head.

Well, that was how Limp Bizkit's My Generation was for me.

From the moment I got my hands on a casette of Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water (and after wondering why they spelled "flavoured" like that*) until the moment the tape ended, I was mezmerized.  It wasn't just that this was an even more expletive-ridden fuck-fest not even Eminem could manage in my eyes; it was the whole thing.  The attitude, the rockin' instruments, Sam Rivers' talents with the bass, John Otto's beats, Wes Borland's riffing, or just the overbearing, magnificent presence of Fred Durst (DJ Lethal gets the "honorable mention") it was one of my favourite things in the whole world.

Fred Durst in particular, with his larger-than-life presence and trademark cap, became a style icon of sorts for me.  In Turkey, it was very uncommon then to do what I was doing, but I did it - I had a Toronto Blue Jays cap*, fleece hoodies were in style, and I had no shortage of sneakers.  I also had this pair of Marks & Spencer cargo pants that had zippers right under the knee, where you could detach the lower pant leg completely and make shorts of 'em.  It was all the rage at school, where we had Wednesdays as casual days*. Before long, I was taking cues from Limp Bizkit videos on how to combine clothing items.

Of course, the album was nothing to sneeze at, too.  From the unabashedly vulgar Hot Dog (which I didn't even know had a Trent Reznor diss in its chorus, something I learned after the fact) to the pumpin' Livin' It Up and Rollin' (Air Raid Vehicle) to the delectable 'fuck you' track Full Nelson... in fact, that song was what taught me the phrase, "your mouth's writing checks that your ass can't cash," that I had to ask one of our English teachers, who was American.  But it doesn't end there - there isn't one among you whom had watched the Mission: Impossible TV series, fallen in love with the theme tune who wouldn't enjoy Take a Look Around.  And for someone who liked rap, or just a fine specimen of rap, Rollin' (Urban Assault Vehicle) was a treat, too.

I never cared much for My Way or Hold On, just to clarify.  The former seemed a bit of a bore, and the latter... well, let's just say, the latter was just... no.

But among all the great tracks, Boiler always stood out, as it does.  It wasn't the darkness that I loved in Boiler, it was rather that it seemed to be about either a break-up (which I hadn't experienced yet) or just a big "fuck you" to a particularly despicable person... but the smashed instruments, the delivery, the bleak, almost downfilled aspect of it always hit close to home.  Because I didn't know thing one about relationships at the time, my perception was guided by tracks like this.  Interesting enough, I would discover just how destructive love actually is.

But Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water did more than just guide my fashion sense, insofar as I had one, or to give me a sense of what this member of the 2000 brigade would end up leading to.  First thing it did was to make me chase music videos.  Just the music wasn't enough, I had to see it visualized, no matter how ridiculous it might've been.  Also, I learned the dances, the moves, I learned to lose myself in the rhythm, the rumbling bass, the feeling that, yeah, fuck you all! Performance-wise, Fred Durst was always a favourite, because while he was made fun of for trying to do the Michael Jackson backstage, he got some moves.

Second, it taught me to manage my money.  By extension, the 2000 brigade was all written down on an ever-expanding spare notepad page (my first album list), given to my dear mother who, while I was in school, would often head out.  She was instructed to buy any item on the list that I could afford.  I had asked her to not go easy on me - if I didn't have the dough, I wouldn't be gettin' nothin', and that was that.

Third, I went from the object of ridicule and bullying to the wannabe kid whom could be use to embarass teachers and entertain classmates by making him perform solo renditions of Limp Bizkit songs, often the full crotch-grabbing, jump-the-fuck-up dances.  Part of me goes red-faced when I recall this, but another part of me remembers having fun, and loving the attention.  Because even though the eyes on me were on me for different reasons, at least they weren't on me with condscension or abject superiority.  Of course, it got old, but I enjoyed it at the time - deathly scared of it, but digging it, something I would later term the "introextrovert's dilemma." I'm sure I'll get to that eventually.

The 2000 brigade's other members have different, but similar stories, but before that, there has to be a tangent about formats and the lengths I went to just to get a copy of a particular album... Three Dollar Bill, Y'all$.

*Footnotes: 1- My English teachers were disputing whether to use the American or British spelling of words when teaching us, but my favourite one was adamant that the British spelling should be considered the original / the default.  As such, I didn't learn to spell words without the 'u's until I got to the university level, and was chided rather harshly for using a hybrid of American and British spellings.
2- That cap was never worn prior to Limp Bizkit.  My uncle on my mother's side is a naturalized Canadian citizen, and the cap had been a gift from him.
3- In Turkey, at least when I was a schoolboy, the drill was that Wednesdays were casual clothing days, but the rest of the week, everyone had to wear school uniforms.