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Drink a lot of soda so they call me Dr. Pepper
I don’t know if it’s because every other CD I own is trapped in some netherworld beneath the front seat in my car, which may feature the collected detritus of many months worth of Taco Bell consumption, and the only album currently at my disposal in the car is A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory, but this is what I’ve been listening to a lot lately. Listening to this album more acutely broils down to listening to the track "Buggin’ Out" on repeat over and over, which is a masterpiece of early ‘90’s hip-hop from my tremendously unversed understanding of rap music-- which is all about product endorsement from what I could gather. "Buggin’ Out" is more the type of song I can get into, the chorus eliciting in my sleep-addled brain early in the morning a bombastic break dancing funk of the synapses. While the whole album is insanely replete with references to the Arsenio Hall show and industry demands and stardom, "Buggin’ Out" is more definitively the track that doesn’t appear to have been exhumed from a time capsule buried in 1991 and part of an overall package which is just gut-bustingly funny. That’s kind of the thing you tend to notice about this genre, is that it is either so breathtakingly fast in its progression, making what sounds good one year by comparison just totally hilarious one year later, or the fact that it is so referential in its product endorsement that most of its potential becomes entangled with the fad it endorses, and thus its staying power becomes about as ephemeral as a pair of Air Jordans. Nevertheless, "Buggin’ Out", a song about freaking out in the face of industry stardom, happens to be the standout track on the album, if only for that same chorus, which just repeats, buggin’outbuggin’outbuggin’outyourebuggin’out. I get my day started to it everyday, appropriating a dance move which combines the traditional head-bobbing “rooster” with a horizontal back and forth shaking of the head which might look like someone affected with a severe case of Swimmers’ Ear. It really is pretty great. And additionally, it adds an almost thematic consistency to my day, because I actually am completely buggin’ out while on my way in to another 8 hour day. And that’s a sentiment which never seems to go out of style.