Did I Like This? (Niggaz4Life)

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Did I Like This? (Niggaz4Life)

Because N.W.A. is as popular again as ever before thanks to Straight Outta Compton, I thought it’s a good time to go back to my own feelings about their music. I was somewhat surprised to see I had written about their first album already (which I had forgotten, which happens after 250+ posts), so today I look at the far more problematic 2nd (or 3rd, depending on what you consider 100 Miles and Runnin’ to be) album Niggaz4Life (or technically Efil4zaggin), released in 1991. It is also their last album and, as more or less shown in the movie, was not as much of a team effort as their debut.

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Did I Like This? (Walking With a Panther)

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Did I Like This? (Walking With a Panther)

Finally, an episode of Did I Like This? that no one has been waiting for! Well, I know not many people come to my blog to read this, but I hate leaving things unfinished, so I decided to explore another past hip-hop album and plan on doing all of them eventually. Today, I pick the other end of the spectrum, far away from the gangsta rap of previous albums: LL Cool J’s third album Walking With a Panther, released in 1989 by Def Jam.

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Did I Like This? (Power)

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Did I Like This? (Power)

After two obscure choices that were on my mind when cooking up the idea for this series, I want to come to something more ‘profound’, I want to say, although that might be the wrong word. My next pick is an album that also has a special place in my childhood gangsta rap heart and this is Ice-T’s second album Power, released in 1988.

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Did I Like This? (The South Park Psycho)

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Did I Like This? (The South Park Psycho)

Because I enjoyed my first re-listening to 90s hip-hop so much, I dove a bit more into it and realized two things: 1) I know a lot of albums from 1990 to 1992, but almost nothing from 1993, making a radical change in course for my music taste (and for the worse since it was time for Eurodance), which also means I listened to all of that rap music between the ages of 10 to 12. That amazes me and will continue to do so when I listen to more albums. 2) I know a lot of albums from that period. And this was the beginning of the 90s without the internet. I didn’t even have a lot of money, so I have no idea how I got all that music. I had a good friend with similar tastes but that doesn't explain where all the music came from.

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Did I Like This? (Banned in the U.S.A.)

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Did I Like This? (Banned in the U.S.A.)

What many don’t know about me is my hip-hop past. When you are very young, you don’t listen to music consciously until at one point you hear something that grabs you. For me, that was hip-hop, or rap as it was mostly called back then. I must have been around 10 or 11 when I got introduced to that kind of music and something spoke to me about it. I mainly started with Public Enemy, one of the most political bands of the last century, so I like to believe that this aspect made it appealing to me. But I was very young, so who knows. Anyway, although my musical tastes changed several times over the years, I always fondly remember hip-hop music and come back to it from time to time. I then also like to believe that the genre has changed for the worse and that (as the cliché goes) everything was better in the past (which normally isn't true). But then again, Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is one of my favourite albums of the last couple of years.

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