In my hometown of South Bend, Indiana, we recently had another bar close related to an instance or instances of violence. It was a place where you had to pass through security before you went in — actually I never thought of its surroundings as a bad neighborhood and I myself grew up about a mile from there, playing Boggle with my mom and petting our kitty cat, and stuff.
Anyway, they had a shooting, and now the whole thing’s obliterated — they even tore the whole building down. When I’d go there, though, it would usually be these black dudes in their 40’s or 50’s playing stuff on the jukebox like the Ohio Players, O-Jays and the Isley Brothers. This is music for motherfu**ers who have seen it all. In the summer, after work, I’m almost sure to put some old ’70s soul on the jukebox, if I’m hanging out in a bar, maybe after taking the edge off with some Alice in Chains and/or Ludacris, initially.
Anyway, last night I saw a video of Bizzie Bone, a member of the venerable’ 90s hip-hop/R&B unit from Cleveland, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, delivering this sort of serenely confident diatribe on the history of music from Cleveland. He said he knows that it’s a Cali thing, but that Cleveland brings the funk, too, mentioning Eddie Levert, Roger Troutman, and, of course, the Players, beholden to the big hit that was covered by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, “Love Rollercoaster.”
Not to toot my own horn, but I think, as somebody who understands the ’90s pretty well, that I am fairly well equipped to discuss music. Along these lines, and perhaps to ease some of the tension of potent bombast and hubris off of my own neck, I would say the same of his Bizzie-ness, and indeed he does even seem to allude to the dizzying array of styles and genres of music he’s experienced in his life. I, for one, love hip-hop, and used to rap, still make beats (Bobby Lobotomy on Bandcamp, if you’re ever bored), but also love classical music, jazz, classic rock, new wave, techno, and of course soul, which again, is like the closest thing you can get to an angel coming out of the sky and making everything better, when the landscape is being cloaked with violence and atrocity.
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