Quality Control

There was a time in the early 2000's when I was listening to a lot of hip hop, and the blame lies squarely with my friend Rob. When we weren't killing each other in Unreal Tournament online, we were hanging out quite bit and playing Magic the Gathering for a few hours each week at his house. We were total nerds, and were having the best of times while doing it. While hanging out, we always had the stereo going, and working through a rotation of CDs. We weren't a perfect match musically, but we did share some common ground...and when we weren't listening to Overkill or Slayer, we were trying to convert each other to other music that we were loving at the moment.

While I kept pushing Cast Iron Hike and Boy Sets Fire, he would force feed me Beastie Boys and Wu-Tang Clan, and eventually we started to rub off on one another a little bit.

It eventually got to the point where I was actively searching out, and downloading a bunch of hip hop stuff. My interest only lasted a few years, and I eventually got bored with the genre...but during that five year period of interest, I did discover a handful of albums that really left a mark on me...and the first album from Jurassic 5 was one of those.

To me, J5 were the hip hop equivalent to 7 Seconds. They weren't looking to pose or be hard...they came across as positive and down to earth, and goddamn, it was fun to just chill with their flow.

These days, it is an extremely rare occasion for me to revisit any of those hip hop albums. For the most part, they just sit on my CD shelf and collect dust...but every once in a while, a warm summer day will inspire me to kick back and bob my head to those beats. A couple of months ago, I was hit by one of those inspirations. I hadn't heard some of this stuff for years, and it was a fun trip back in time, to when I cared about this shit.

When I saw that Newbury Comics had an exclusive pressing available for the first Jurassic 5 album, and they were having a 25% off sale on all vinyl, I couldn't resist adding it to the collection. I've never been overly interesting in buying vinyl for those rap records, but I suppose that every once in a while, I'll make an exception.