1 September 1993 (with more of the same here)
— Gavin Reeve
As everyone who has ever had a subscription will tell you, magazines operate on a completely different calendar than the rest of us. I currently subscribe to Mojo, a music mag which specializes in pop's history. Being a British journal and me in the southwest corner of South Korea, each one takes its sweet old time getting to me (particularly the two that never showed up at all). As I write this, I am waiting for the March 2024 issue to arrive. March 2024 at the end of January: only in the world of magazines does this make any sense.
Perhaps this explains why Gavin Reeve predicts that "Boom! Shake the Room" will be exploding on turntables (and, indeed, shaking the rooms they're spinning in) "this summer". In the issue of Smash Hits from the first day of September 1993. Was this a result of oddball magazine dating methods? Or had Gav simply filed his review a few weeks early so that he could follow Temple of the Dog on their tour of southern Europe? Or had he been stuck in the Hits offices burning the candle at both ends that he ceased to notice the passing of the seasons at all?
Granted, it hadn't been much of a summer. Those wet El Nino summers seemed to peak in '93 with rain and flooding a regular part of the weather forecasts and the national news. I'd get up from a nice teenage slumber at ten or eleven in the morning and the dark clouds would just be settling in. You'd get a rare nice day and it would tease you into thinking that it was finally going to turn around and then it would be followed by four days of nothing but showers. July and August had been so miserable that I wasn't even dreading heading back to school.
So, rather than this being played at seaside hops, it was destined for high school discos. And with this return to classes, this meant another season of TV was approaching. (Or at least this was the case in North America; Britain probably didn't get a new crop of sitcoms until early in the new year or something) I was into The Simpsons and Kids in the Hall and already missing The Wonder Years, a show that went off the air just as it seemed poised to deal with Kevin Arnold and Winnie Cooper losing their virginity (the finale implied that they did it in a barn one rainy night following a heated argument but the producers were evidently too squeamish to say so outright). Cheers had wrapped up on my sixteenth birthday with a dismal final episode but people seemed to think its spin-off, centred around the show's least memorable character, had promise. (It ended up not being my thing but everyone else seemed to think that Frasier was "classy" so what the hell do I know?)
The other show I was still just about interested in was The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air even though it was beginning to feel increasingly irrelevant. I don't know if it had a 'Jump the Shark' moment but it hadn't been as good once Will and Carlton had moved on from their fancy prep school to university. Also, it was at this time that a different actress began playing Aunt Viv, a character who had ended the previous season having given birth to a baby boy, signs that the show was beginning to go downhill. It was during this autumn that I began watching Seinfeld which seemed to signal my increasing disinterest in shows like Fresh Prince. In one episode from an earlier season Will is suddenly a basketball star who is being scouted by various colleges: his talent for the sport hadn't mattered a whole lot before and wouldn't be mentioned again. This very season, the cousins attempted to pledge to one of those pathetic American fraternities only for Carlton to be rejected for "not being enough of a brother to be a brother". Though the episode would conclude with the implication that he would be reinstated, this storyline never came up again. Seinfeld never pulled this sort of nonsense. (To be fair, this was also the season in which Will met his deadbeat Dad which proved to be televisual gold)
Fresh Price seemed like the pinnacle for Will Smith. He'd had his novelty hip hop career doing "Parents Just Don't Understand" and "Nightmare on My Street" and "Summertime" alongside chum DJ Jazzy Jeff but they were taken no more seriously than, say, Kid 'N Play, another jokey act of the age that tried to make the crossover into films and TV. There was no reason to think that Smith would be any better at it. Then, Fresh Prince came along and doubters were proved wrong. But as that series dragged on into a very unnecessary fifth season and, from there, an "oh, is this show still on?" sixth, it seemed like Smith was just hanging on. The only thing that held out any promise for him was his film career, especially after his supporting role in Six Degrees of Separation and a co-lead spot in Bad Boys. (That said, it was impossible to foresee that his star would go supernova with Independence Day and Men in Black)
But what about his music, the medium that had got him started in the first place? Well, it had become more and more of an afterthought as his acting career began to take off. "Summertime" gave the duo a memorable 1991 Top 10 hit and it had been a slightly more sophisticated take on their 'boys will be boys' brand of rap and pop, as though they'd been soaking up lots of De La Soul and Jungle Brothers. A harder edge began to creep in too which became more fully realised with "Boom! Shake the Room", as well as much of what would appear on album Code Red. While it was a brave move
A fair assessment of this record is hard to give. I don't think much of it but I feel like it's as good as Smith and Jazz were capable. Most of the early stuff is too childish to count for much and Smith's subsequent material for soundtracks like Men in Black and Wild Wild West is appalling. Whatever promise they may have had ended up being squandered due to more lucrative pursuits. Being more of a dilettante act, there's the sense that they did the playful stuff, moved over to something more chill and then tried to go hardcore, without actually committing themselves to any one sound. To the extent that they'd ever been serious about their rap careers, by '93 they couldn't quite shake the notion that making music had become almost like a hobby.
On the other hand, "Boom! Shake the Room" is about as serious as they ever got. That's not to say it's any good but at least they were trying to shake off the image of being merry pranksters that had solidified around them ever since the debut of Fresh Prince. Though I've never been much of a hip hop fan, I do occasionally find myself in situations in which I'm digging a bit of old school rap, often while I'm waiting for my wife in a shopping centre. In addition, doing this blog has reminded me of how great Public Enemy and Run DMC were. That said, I can only go so far with this newfound open mindedness: I still don't think much of The Beastie Boys and I remain unconvinced about this hardcore side of Jazzy Jeff & Fresh Prince.
Reeve compares it to Marky Mark which is fitting given that both Mark Wahlberg and Will Smith would both go on to major success in Hollywood following hip hop careers. Marky always tried to sound tough but this only made him seem increasingly feeble; with Smith it's more that his tough side has come out but at the expense of his natural charm that had help make him so popular. In a way, he was right to turn his back on hip hop since he couldn't really be taken seriously no matter what he did; whereas in the movies people loved him as Capt. Steven Hiller, Agent J and Muhammad Ali. He may have lacked range on his records but he faced no similar problem on film.
Though a UK number one smash, as well as a Top 20 hit in North America that everyone quickly forgot all about, Jazzy Jeff & Fresh Prince were no longer needed by 1993. Though much less popular upon release, an album would come out at the end of the year that would make them look silly. Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) is a deeply influential hip hop recording which introduced the world to the extraordinary production skills of leader The RZA, in addition to launching the careers of Method Man, ODB and Ghostface Killa among others. Some of them didn't need to prove how badass they were while others weren't about to pretend to be something they weren't. The members of Staten Island's Wu-Tang Clan weren't knocking on the doors of Hollywood directors because they had work to be done in hip hop. It was what they were good at. Just as Seinfeld exposed shows like Fresh Prince for the relics that they were, Wu-Tang made us all forget about quaint little rap groups like DJ Jazz Jeff & Fresh Prince.
~~~~~
Also Reviewed This Fortnight
James: "Sometimes"
The band that I always quite liked (though never enough for me to go out and buy any of their albums) returned in '93 not with "Laid", the single that just about broke them in North America, but with "Sometimes", a song with a pair of significant strikes against it. First, the title is unoriginal; with the possible exception of "Stay", no single word has been done to death in terms of song name. More problematic is the "Sometimes I look in your eyes and see your soul..." line which should prompt everyone to wretch. Should. Luckily, James was and is led by Tim Booth, an unconventionally charismatic bloke with just the right amount of cleverness and passion in his rather overlooked voice to pull it off. The backing vocalists — who, according to Wikipedia, are legend Brian Eno and a lass called Martine McDonagh — sound sickening pleased by the sentiment but Booth is just too caught up in the whirl of romance and pop joy and gives a fantastic performance. Not quite their absolute best but one I quite like from that band I quite like — not that I would've gone out and bought it or anything.
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