Jason Rodriguez - The Moose in the Closet: Pop Thought, Props to Pops and Back to the Swords

Check out the folks of Pop Thought. Alex Ness recently interviewed my man Jason Copland (pronounced “Cop-land”, despite what he says) and there are even a couple of WToT4 preview pages up in case you want to take a sneak peak. Pop Thought has some great writers contributing for them, I’m particularly fond of Joe Hilliard’s stuff; the guy is all right.

My pops comes out of hiding to drop some wisdom. Preach on pops. Preach on. We're using the haloscan comments link now, though.

Well, hot on my new story idea I went ahead and wrote it. Now I need to get some input, find an artist collaborator and start working on layouts with him/her. This story is going to house you, I’m crazy jazzed about it. Now the bad news is that it’s 1AM and I haven’t done my story for my blog yet. So guess what? You’re getting a story from the reserves. Yes, the reserves, where I keep about ten stories that are good but better served as an “in case I need a story”. Enjoy, suckers.

When the Wu came on the scene in the 90s New York City was ready for them. There was an insane amount of buzz around these guys, bootleg copies of the “Protect Ya Neck” single started making its way in the cassette players of every hip-hop fan in the five boroughs. I remember circling around a boombox with several friends, playing the scuffed-up black Memorex cassette my copy of the single was on, each of us taking turns rapping over the Wu. The second wave of bootleg cassettes had the Method Man b-side, minus the Torture intro but amazing none the less. Then we saw the video popping up on The Box, people would phone it in constantly, the Box soon became the Protect Ya Neck channel (for those that don’t know, The Box was a phone in video channel where you pay a buck to watch the video you want, supposedly, I never called).

There was a teen club in Bay Ridge at the time called the Catilion (or something like that). Word started coming around down the Method Man himself was going to make an appearance there one Friday night. We all snatched up tickets to see the Method, and come that Friday the Catilion was probably the number one destination for car services all over Brooklyn.

I’ve been to the Catilion once before this and got into a bit of shoving match and never went back. The time I was there, it was maybe 25% capacity. It was packed this Friday, a sea of 16 year old white kids spread across the sprawling dance floor, holding glasses of Orange Juice and Coke-a-Cola.

The Method showed up at around 10PM and did a whole lotta “Yo, yo, yos” and a few “Is Brooklyn in da house? I cant hear you! Is Brooklyn in the mother fuckin’ house?” He then went into his lone track, Method Man (obviously) and that was about it. He did, however, say he was going to jump off the stage and he wanted us “mother fuckers” to catch him. But he laughed and decided not to, saying he didn’t trust us “mother fuckers”. And that was it; about 5 or 6 minutes.

“Back to the Swords” is a phrase the Gza uses in Liquid Swords:

See sometimes, Ya gotta flash ‘em back. See, niggaz don’t know where this shit started, Ya’ll know where it came from, I’m sayin’ we gonna take ya’ll back to the swords. We bounce.

I’m sort of using it here, because I find it funny how you can sometimes see these acts early on, before they're larger than life, and see them go through their growing pains. I mean, the fucking Method Man did a song in a teen club on a Friday night in one of the whitest neighborhoods in Brooklyn. That’s going back to the mother fucking swords.

For rock bands it’s one thing, they’re supposed to be raw and unrehearsed and sloppy. It’s part of that “fuck you image”. For hip-hop groups, you’re supposed to be cool, and there is nothing cool about asking a bunch of teenagers if “Brooklyn is in the mother fuckin’ house”. That’s a step above a Bar Mitzvah.

I saw Eminem early on as well. He opened for a G-Love and the Special Sauce with Oukast concert up at Boston College. He got on stage, did that one song, and then said “They told me I can’t take my pants off. Fuck them, I’m out.” He then walked off, which was fine with the audience, we weren’t there for that white boy. We were there for G-Love, a much more talented white boy.

If I went back to my swords, nothing would really be different. I’m still as awkward as I was back then; only difference is I get laid a lot more now. Granted, it’s usually awkward sex, but awkward sex is better than no sex. And no sex is better than doing a hip-hop show at the Catilion. It’s all relative, really.

turn off the metallica, fanboy: Liquid Swords

Labels: mitc

Pop Thought, Props to Pops and Back to the Swords

Tuesday, April 19, 2005

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