EWA100 - #98. Luniz - I Got 5 On It

98. Da Luniz - I Got 5 On It (Noo Trybe/Virgin. 1995. From The LP Operation: Stackola)

Mike Dikk: For the longest time I thought The Luniz were from Florida. It turns out they’re from Oakland. Florida just strikes me as the type of place that would have this type of rap music floating around in a dark corner somewhere. I also think Do or Die and Poison Clan are from Florida. I think at least one of them are, but who cares really?
I have to tell you, I am a total sucker for rap songs where there’s a male crooner emotionally singing about something as ridiculous as throwing down five dollars to buy a dime bag of weed. Who the fuck buys dime bags of weed? More so, what kind of rapper with rap money, whether that rap money is real or fabricated is buying a dime bag? You can’t even fill a blunt with a dime bag. Plus, dude says “Let’s go half on a sack”, and usually a sack would be nothing less than a $20 bag. So not only is this dude (Who sounds like L.V. from that popular Coolio song) emotionally singing about purchasing marijuana, but he’s technically wrong about what he’s emotionally singing about. Ain’t that a bitch.
Who made this beat? Jesus Christ? What a beautiful work of minimalist audio art. It’s no wonder like 800 other people have tried to jack it. You can listen to this beat for around 13 days straight until it gets kind of tiring. I have never heard this entire record, let alone another Luniz song, but does it really matter? Was anything ever going to top this? I still hear people bumping this in their cars every now and then. Of course it could be one of the aforementioned “reworkings”, but I’d like to think it’s not.
There’s a lot of shit on this list that’s pretty obvious, and I’d like to think this is a pretty obvious song that you should know and listen to regularly, but I’ve heard that not everyone who listens to rap music smokes weed. I really don’t believe that, but if it is true, you should track down this song and treat yourself to a dime bag. You may have to go back to high school to find someone that actually sells those, probably somewhere outside of the back entrance of the school. Once you find that dime bag, you roll it up in a joint since it won’t be enough to roll in a blunt, but you can color the paper in with brown magic marker to simulate a blunt, and you smoke that god damn thing and listen to this song until you realize how awesome it was to be young and free of responsibility and STD’s in the summer of 1995.

Raven Mack: Summertime was made for ironic R&B singing and smoking weed. This song will stand the test of all times, even after society has crumbled and rebuilt three times over, and there are no more black and white people, just various shades of mulattos, all oppressed by space lieutenants with eggheads, and even though, the more intelligently sneaky of our mulatto descendents will sneak away from the slave camps, or at least hide out together behind a hatching pod facility in an abandoned storage module, and smoke leafy mind-altering substances and groove to this here song.
Hahaha, people listening to rap who don't smoke weed? Yeah right, maybe New Yorker contributors and born again "hip" Christian camp counselors who are down with whichever of those seven Baldwin brothers is the skateboard Jesus freak now, but not real life people. All real life people at least partially love either rap music or weedsmoke inhalations, and if you enjoy either one of them a lot, you are bound to eventually get involved with the other one as well. The repetitive mind-plucking sounds of hip hop beats are perfect for being stoned enough to put on headphones and over-analyze the crazy shit you hear. One time, I was stoned as shit, listening to DJ Quik on a shitty boombox, and trying to figure out how he made the guitar sample float in the air above my head. That takes some seriously mad science.

Download: Luniz - I Got 5 On It

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