The Cellar Door: Wu-Tang, Fat Jon and EST

When D got the ball rolling with The Cellar Door, I was pretty excited. We're a fly by the seat of our pants organization here at CotP, so I had no idea D was going to do so. There's lots of stuff I wasn't up on at the time of its release and have since learned much more about, but in my mind, The Cellar Door is also an opportunity to look back on some of the stuff we listened to in our younger days for better or for worse. Today, I'll be looking at some music I was into at ages 12, 19 and 21.

My first four tape purchases (between 1993 and 1995) were as follows: Naughty by Nature's 19 Naughty III, Warren G's Regulate...G Funk Era, Snoop's Doggystyle and Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill. My mom, worried about the drug implications of the title, hid the Alanis tape and let me wear out the rest in my boombox.

Over the next few years, through their older brothers and sisters, my friends and I began to discover some of the nuance of hip hop. We studied up on the rap scene from coast to coast through the only means available to us (The Source, MTV and a friend's crazy black box radio that, on clear nights, picked up Jam'n 94.5 from Boston roughly 120 miles away) and in the mean time, listened to Rage Against the Machine and Dave Matthews Band. Since those early years of getting into music, several of these childhood friends have turned away from (or "grown out of") hip hop. I think it could have gone either way for me; I was a HUGE Biggie, Run-DMC, and NWA fan and would've continued listening to them, but you never know.

In the summer of 1997, just before my 13th birthday, Wu-Tang dropped the highly-anticipated Forever. I was living in California for the summer with my aunt, uncle and my 7 year old cousin, Spencer. They didn't want Spence to pick up my passion for hip hop, so they would try to shepherd him towards his toys whenever I put on BET, but he loved the lead single "Triumph," as did I; over the next few weeks, I taught him the lyrics (with the curses removed, don't worry) and we would take turns pretending we were Meth or Ghostface and just wild out (to use the terminology of the day) upon seeing the video.

I'm not sure what it was about "Triumph" that we, two rural-raised kids with little in common with the members of Wu, identified with. "Triumph" appears as a pretty straight forward rap song, with few bells or whistles in the production, but upon closer examination there's clearly something different at work. The track features all nine members of the group over a minimal beat, driven by heavy-hitting bass drums and a deep, violent string section, and then when you think it's about to reach a crescendo, it just ends abruptly, five and a half minutes in. There's no chorus, and save for ten seconds of ODB proclaiming how long Wu-Tang will be around at the immediate beginning of the song, the first few bars sound exactly the same as the last few.

I wish I had the presence of mind to carry a notebook in my pocket as I do now so I could put my finger on it (though I can't fault myself, I had other things on my mind, like avoiding getting grounded and trying to convince girls to make out with me, both of which I struggled mightily with). After nearly 12 years of scrutiny, I think it's four things: 1) The aggression in the voices of everyone who graces the mic 2) The energy of the beat 3) The skill of the flow of each rapper (though I'm not sure I recognized that in 1997) and 4) The tension that all of these factors combine to create. A few weeks ago, I wrote about The Field and how his tracks often seem to be building to a place that they never actually achieve, that's what intrigues me about his music; I think this is exactly why I love "Triumph" even after 12 years. The lack of traditional song structure combined with the aggressiveness and unintentional humor of the video make for a captivating track that I still haven't tired of listening to. I'm still convinced that Wu-Tang's Forever was that second hook for me with hip hop. That is, stuff like Snoop, Warren G, Biggie et. al. was the initial hook for me, but Wu-Tang helped cement my relationship with rap and hip hop.

Check it out...500 or so pixels below.

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I'll keep these next two anecdotes short, because if you stuck with that ramble through my personal history with Wu-Tang, you deserve it. When I was 19 and about to head off to college, a friend of a friend passed along Fat Jon the Ample Soul Physician's Lightweight Heavy. I love this album, and it has the perfect sound for my mood during my freshman year: it's got a solid beat, though not in your face about it, with a few melancholy moments sprinkled in (and no, I don't have long black bangs or wear eye-liner, thank you). I don't know much about Fat Jon, other than he was once boys with Pase Rock, he was once part of a group called Five Deez and he's from Cincinatti. "Talk to Me" is my jam.

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My final track is a track that is near and dear to me for who I associate it with. I'm sure some of you have had to write a thesis at some point, either in undergrad or grad school. At Bates, Heavy D's and my alma mater, senior thesis is no joke. You spend at least a semester writing on a topic most start out excited by and end up completely fed up with. There are long nights, early mornings and no matter your time management skills, a tremendous amount of stress.

No one I've encountered during the thesis process had quite as many long nights, early mornings and stress levels than two friends of mine each two years ahead of D and I at Bates. They camped out in the Ronj, the student run coffee house, for all hours of the day, sometimes spending as much as 72 hours working without sleeping. The primary method for staying awake was a stomach-flipping, heart-burning cocktail of crushed up Adderall (prescribed, of course) stirred into a can of Red Bull. It was not a pretty sight.

Astonishingly, neither of these two wore headphones while they worked. For the most part, they didn't listen to music, but I'm convinced that one song kept them sane during their month and a half insomnia/Adderall binge: Esbjörn Svensson Trio's "In My Garage." Eventually, after several hundred listens, both grew tired of it, but I still believe that the dulcet tones of Svensson's piano, Dan Berglund's bass and Magnus Öström's light drumming kept both of these guys from completely giving up and losing hope. If you're reading, fellas, I hope, that among other things, you've stopped putting crushed Adderall into Red Bull.

Sadly, due to Svensson's tragic death last summer, EST is no more. Still give "In My Garage" a listen. There's nothing remarkable about it, just a solid, smooth jazz track.

Wu-Tang Clan - Triumph
Fat Jon the Ample Soul Physician - Talk to Me
Esbjörn Svensson Trio - In My Garage