— William Shaw
"I see hip hop today as school", Monie Love told someone from Smash Hits' Bitz section in the summer of 1989. "My teachers are Public Enemy, my classmates are the likes of The Jungle Brothers, De La Soul, Boogie Down Productions, MC Mellow, MC Lyte..." She was righter than she knew. If Chuck D was that stern Language Arts instructor who you ended up learning far more from than you ever would have expected, then The Jungle Brothers were those unruly boys who never gave Mr. D a moment's peace. If Flavor Flav was the popular Social Studies teacher who coached the hopeless junior boys volleyball team and ran a board games club in his classroom over the lunch break, then the members of De La Soul were the lads who got involved in activities but never bothered doing their homework (just my kind of people!). If Professor Griff was the scary librarian with sketchy views on race and gender, then Monie Love was that crotchety old fool's worst nightmare. (I can keep this going too: if PE's anonymous armed guards were the home ec and shop teachers no one cared about, then MC Mellow and MC Lyte were the students who no one recognized while flipping through the yearbook; I can't seem to come up with student-teacher comparisons to Terminator X though)
Of course, what Love probably meant was that she and her Daisy Age rap cohorts were learning from Public Enemy but I like to think that they were acquiring lessons and skills from them while disregarding others. That's an effective student-teacher relationship. I hope she has subsequently become the teacher herself, passing on what she learned to the next generation. She'd have a lot to contribute to a group of impressionable hip hop youngsters and that's not even touching the fact that she had a lot to say about her education at the time.
"Monie in the Middle" is one of many hip hop singles of the time with a video set in a school (just off the top of my head there's also De La Soul's "Me, Myself and I" and Young MC's "Principal's Office" but I'm certain there are plenty more). But where the majority of the others deal with students having troubles with their teachers, this one concerns that worst kind of classroom love triangle: Monie in between a "knucklehead" loser who wants to be with her and the "homeboy" who apparently likes her back. I say "apparently" because she's composing letters to him just as the jerk she spurned was doing for her — and there's nothing in the lyrics to suggest that he hadn't "scrunched up the letter" in turn. Is Monie so obsessed about the silly twit in her class with a crush because she sees a bit of herself in him? (There probably wasn't much she could learn from teachers Mr. D, Mr. Flav and Griff the Giant Git)
In any case, the song is a good warning call for guys like myself who could get a little too hung up on girls that clearly had no interest in them. (In my experience, however, not a whole lot changed even after some began to reciprocate my desires) Sadly, few of us teenage dweebs were unable to heed it because not enough people bothered to go out and buy it. It seems hard to believe that "Monie in the Middle" didn't even get a nominal Top 40 placing. Were spotty British youths turned off by her being so forthright with them? If that is the case, then where were the empowered girls who should've felt that they had an ally? (I never descended so low that I followed anyone into the "ladies' bathroom" but I'm sure more than enough sad types who'd now be regarded as incels would've done so) Overt feminism in pop seldom does as well as it deserves and this was no exception.
With some stellar production from Andy Cox and David Steel of Fine Young Cannibals (possibly returning the favour from Love's excellent rap on the excellent remix of FYC's 1989 hit "She Drives Me Crazy") and samples from jazz and samba, "Monie in the Middle" is a fantastic single and should have at least matched the Top 20 performances of the so-so "Grandpa's Party" and the marvelous "It's a Shame (My Sister)", which came out later in 1990. She had been all about going to school but this isn't something that can be done forever. Perhaps the first sign that her approach was set to change was the uncharacteristically mature cover art of her debut album Down to Earth, which manages to make her look like an earnest R&B vocalist. Maturity is always difficult for young artists to deal with but luckily we'll be meeting Monie Love again on this blog so we can see how she managed. Stay tuned.
~~~~~
Also of some cop
The Soup Dragons: "I'm Free"
From the end of June in 1991 until I finished school four years later, "I'm Free" was my start of the summer holidays anthem of choice — but why did it fail to catch on with anyone else? Celebratory and with a chorus that everyone can singalong with instantly, it has both terrace chant and high school graduation theme written all over it. An early Jagger-Richards composition, it was nothing special when The Rolling Stones first recorded it but kudos to The Soup Dragons (or their management, or their record label) for seeing potential in it. Happy Mondays had set the template for the baggy cover version with their still stunning rendition of "Step On" but the choir, the dancefloor beat and the memorable toasting courtesy of Junior Reid ramps it up to another levels of joy (even if I'd still take "Step On" over "I'm Free" in a pinch). You can all have your bittersweet numbers by bloody Green Day or Natalie Merchant as you bid farewell to school or the job you hate or as you move to another country but I'll have this. I might even have it played at my funeral, which would be laugh if only for me.
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