World Wide Known Whether You Like It Or Not

I had a song take me back twenty-four years today. It was a stupid commercial for the Grammy’s that did it. They have a spot with LL Cool J’s “Rock The Bells” playing over a montage of a bunch of crap. I think he may be getting a lifetime achievement award. “Rock The Bells” changed my life. I wrote about teenagers having their lives changed by music almost a year ago, and this is one of the songs that did it for me. My love of hip-hop starts with this song. I liked Run D.M.C. and earlier stuff, but LL Cool J’s first big single spoke to me. It’s pure testosterone. It was the first song that I ever heard that was unapologetically aggressive. I was fifteen. It had an effect. I taped it off the radio – Power 95, baby – because I didn’t have the $7.49 that Coconuts and Turtles wanted for the cassette and even if I did have the money I didn’t have a consistent way to get to da wreka stow. I listened to it over and over again the way kids do. This song defined my tenth grade, along with Michael Jordan coming back for the playoffs after breaking his foot early in the season and a bunch of math teachers getting fired for breaking some testing rules. I had three Algebra 2 teachers. The first left because of cancer. The second was as close to a street pimp as a math teacher has ever gotten, and the third got fired for cheating. The whole thing was B.S. because he never gave us any kind of “heads up”. I didn’t do very well in Algebra 2, mostly because math sucks, but also because I sat next to the second hottest chick in the school. I was fifteen. She had an effect. This song was one of the ice breakers. She didn’t like it because it wasn’t “danceable”. I had to explain to her that it wasn’t about dancing. It was about LL Cool J reppin’ Queens and dissin’ suckas. I actually said that to her. She made fun of me, and I was about to get angry, but she shoulder bumped me at the same time and I smelled her hair, which obviously fried my brain since I remember it a quarter of a century later. Being fifteen sucked.