What’s the platonic ideal for a youtube upload of a rare song?
By rare I mean truly rare. No allmusic entries, barely any google results. Bonus points if it’s not available on the real streaming sites. It’s deep in the bin of lost tapes and CDs that have become youtube-only.
The video upload itself should be extremely lo-fi. Best is video in name only: a grainy still (or unintentionally moving) shot of the album art, cassette tape or record label.
The Comments
First of all you need one or more wistful remembrances of where the commenter was when they heard the song and what it meant to them. (This Buzzfeed story on youtube comments to songs remains a classic 8 year later.)
Some random enthusiasm in Cyrillic:
Now we’re mining real gold: someone who claims to have created the song.
Multiple people? A nascent reunion?
And that’s it. Perfect anti-climax. Silence for the last seven years.
Did they get together? Was one of them lying? Did they ever release another cassette? I’ve been coming back to this bookmarked page myself for at least four years since I discovered it and nothing has changed. I almost feel bad linking to it, as if I might pollute the isolated island ecosystem preserved there. (But since no one reads this I’ll take that risk.) Another Day in the Bay by Soul Kitchen (1995) I’m not going to embed — you have to click through for the full effect. It’s the real thing.
At this point I appreciate the retro aesthetics of Youtube itself. The URL scheme is still the same. The familiar viewport and search bar have been with us almost 20 years by now. They really haven’t messed it up too bad and I’m grateful for that. Finding some music on youtube is a familiar experience like fumbling for the play button on a boombox was. I’ve been listening to songs with this “setup” for about as long as my childhood lasted with my parents’ old record player. Twenty-year-old songs blend with the fifteen-year-old interface and ten-year-year old comments.
The song itself is pretty good, which is of course why I keep coming back to it in the first place. (Not too many hip hop songs namecheck Daly City, although genius.com says there are a few others.)
1994/95 has special significance for me as the year I got to the Bay. (Although of course I wasn’t listening to this yet.) Mid-90s Bay Area rap remains the best, but I didn’t discover it until the early 00s. I was always chasing it down as a retro phenomenon.
There’s something so poignant about excitedly dropping “the 94, we’re in the house for the 94.” (In the second verse the vocalist talks about getting out of CYA in 1993.) How were those numbers on the calendar ever so low? This song might not be the best GLP but it is pretty great. The unashamed use of the echo effects on the vocals and the “stoner bells” date it exactly to the mid-90s in an awesome way.
(“I Got 5 on It” by Oakland’s Luniz [1995] was a nationwide hit with some of that same Bay Area sound and “stoner bells”. Last night I heard its killer bass+bells riff being used for mid-game stadium hype music at a Warriors-Clippers game. It still works. The official video is a generic party scene which kind of ruins it, you need to find an audio-only video. The lyrics are pure broke teenager with a level of paranoid desperation that doesn’t go with the party. The “5” in the refrain is literally five dollars.)
You know how it goes, I have to recommend some more gems from this GLP album now that I’m re-listening to it. I encountered these songs as random MP3s, it wasn’t until much later that I realized that they’d all appeared on an actual album. The MP3s were always labeled with the featured vocalist. It’s a commonplace to bemoan how much we’ve lost with the transition to digital movies but I do think we underestimate how much we gained with that first mp3 transition to digital music. I once witnessed an older Bay Area music fan literally shriek with joy when this song was found on mp3:
He had it on a cassette that he’d lost in the mid-90s and it had attained a mythical status in his mind. In those days before nationwide online markets and mp3s, lost underground music could really be lost. It’s pretty good! It’s got those bells again. I love the synth riff that kicks in around :20. It’s like they took the early-90s high synth line from “Nothing But a G Thang” et al and went faster and more processed.
But for my money it’s Locked Up:
A low-key menacing personal tale with the combination of cliches and real-life details of the hard-boiled California prison stories of Eddie Bunker. (“I had on Filas; I didn’t want to get em dirty / Guards on the top watching with a 30/30.”) Tight rhymes with all those period sound effects and a lived-in beat. There’s a simple but effective story structure gimmick: the narrative proceeds linearly and methodically and then abruptly cuts off at the point the song you’re listening to is presumably recorded.
Thank you to the semi-anonymous noz who ran the cocaineblunts.com blog for many years and provided us all with a deep cache of hard-to-find mp3s. (The blog’s title is, of course, a reference to mid-90s Bay Area Rap God Andre Nickatina.) I am still kicking myself for losing some of the stuff I downloaded from it long ago. Not everything is on youtube. I swear he had a version of Ras Kass’s “Root of Evil” that was way better than the one that’s out there. Just looking back the site’s heyday on the internet archive I found his three-part interview with Boots Riley full of deep industry knowledge: https://web.archive.org/web/20060512010524/http://www.cocaineblunts.com/new/
This is a real document, especially given all that Boots has been up to since. It just seems that dense blogs like that don’t exist any more and the ones that did have been deleted. The site still exists as a redirect to his roundup playlists. Which are great. (And made up of youtube singles, of course.) But I miss the old mp3 blogs of the late 2000s. Like everyone else I’m just an aging commenter writing some version of the ubiquitous lament: What happened to stuff I liked and why isn’t the new stuff as good anymore? I found this gem on one of the above songs but it might as well be auto-populated by youtube itself:
