The word “Heraldo” is always fun to hear, because it almost always refers to the early ’90’s, or happens on an album that was made in the early ’90’s, like 1991’s I Wish My Brother George Was Here by Del the Funkee Homosapien, also sometimes known as Del the Funky Homosapien, and/or Deltron Zero, a member of Deltron, in addition to his work with the group Hieroglyphics. So it makes me feel young. Anyway, I Wish My Brother George Was Here = very fun album, even influential on C.L. Smooth (why sugarcoat it, he bit), what with Del’s technique of rhyming a syllable on the fifth beat of a phrase with the one on the eighth, deviating from the usual third/seventh, fourth/eighth couplings.
There’s not a song about his brother George on the album (actually the title is apparently a reference to George Clinton, whose influence looms audibly large enough that I figured he must have produced the LP), but think of the album in general as an active statement in defense of complaint. Barring the intro, the first five songs are all about something different, and specifically, all handle something different for the purpose of bitching. The things he bitches about, in order, are: di**-riders (excuse the term, the elusiveness of a better one probably prompted the name “Mistadobalina” in the first place), public transportation, white people trying to rap, prejudice in favor of the light-skinned (the Negro light-skinned), and unofficial ostensible prostitution, also known as contemporary dating norms. “Ahone One, Ahone Two,” track 07 on the album, is pretty much the cut that every emcee in the business would like to lay down at some point in his or her career, something like Common’s “I Used to Love H.E.R.” or (excuse me Del) Eminem’s “‘Til I Collapse,” but amazingly, not even yet the centerpiece.
There’s a song by The Beatles on an album I for some odd reason never listen to, Magical Mystery Tour (probably because the titled track opener is a little overplayed and annoying) that made me say to myself, wow, this song really reminds me of what I assume is the feeling of flying. I looked at the tracklist. The song was called “Flying.” This exact same thing happened while I was listening to Brother George and got to track 10. He’s saying something about going back to Africa and riding on a rhinoceros, except he uses cooler terminology (a “Motherland/other land” rhyme, et al), and it really made me feel like I was listening to a member of a repressed race finally get past all the bogus B.S. that’s been thrown in his way in this life, everything from being profiled to having his own species basically whore themselves out while still finding the audacity to nitpick and be arrogant regarding the ways in which they do this, and really get “Rec with the creator,” as Pete Rock said — massaging listener’s ear drums with a homily delivered straight back to the heavens, that which blessed him with the pipes to do so. I figure, if he really hated white people, he wouldn’t have made a song this good available to us. So I can enjoy even “Pissin’ on Your Steps,” even though it in a sense disparages my race. It still sounds good, it’s “funky,” so to speak. But girls still don’t like hip-hop, and I plan on trying to mate with one someday, so thus spawns a new problem. Maybe sometime soon I’ll get up the gumption to write a song about it. Damned if I’d have the audacity to perform it in front of Del though.