in keeping with recent posts aboot "what ever happened to..." type music and moving i unearthed a few gems today hunting through the "needs to be sorted" pile of stuff.

DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince - He's the DJ, I'm the Rapper. the only reason i originally bought this casette was the fact that my best friend at the time (who was never a reliable source of information related to the music industry) told me that these guys were getting sued by Wes Craven over their track Nightmare on My Street. from what he told me, they had unlawfully used the Freddy character and story line for the song. the album was going to be pulled from the shelves and was going to be worth SO MUCH MONEY. and, of course, when you're 12 you believe all of this nonsense. i remember there being three or four of the 18 tracks that were worth listening to, but i also remember it being too much effort to fast forward to the right songs since good ol' jazzy jeff and will smith (the fresh prince) decided for some reason that it wasn't a good idea to put the good songs at the beginning of the album. the only reason i would recommend this album to anyone is if they had some sort of thing for will smith or scratch-heavy rap music intended for pre-teens.

DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince - And In This Corner... if there's anything worse than owning one DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince album, it's owning two. for the third consecutive album this pair had managed a couple of catchy tracks (Then She Bit Me always cracked me up and was thankfully the first song on the album) but, again, saturated the rest of the album with pop-rap filler that seemed (seems?) to be the popular thing to do at the time (we'll talk about Tone Loc's album another time). this one was actually a gift, and none of my hard-earned sears catalogue delivering dollars were spent here. i knew better... well, at least i thought i did (again, we'll talk about Tone Loc's album another time).

when i was younger i always figured that evenutally these guys would have enough popular tracks to manage to fill a Greatest Hits album, but from what i can tell it never happened. another couple of albums burdened with poor sales and the two went their separate ways. Will Smith went on to make bazillions of dollars, and Jazzy Jeff still tours the world scratching records the way he always loved to. probably not making bazillions of dollars, but probably making more money than me.

i don't think it was until long after the 90s were over that i was in fact a child of the 80s.

stay tuned to find more about the other tapes that i've recently uncovered... AC/DC's Back in Black, Ice-T's Original Gangster and both of my copies of Michael Jackson's Thriller.

oh yeah, and Tone Loc's Loc'ed After Dark.