EWA100 - #64. Camp Lo - Luchini (This is it)

64. Camp Lo - Luchini (This Is It) (Profile. 1997. From the LP Uptown Saturday Night)

Mike Dikk: Camp Lo’s “Luchini” makes me afraid of the future and aging. You see, I love this song to a point where disliking this song is a totally foreign concept to me. I don’t know if people really exist that don’t think “Luchini” is the greatest jam to start a party off with, but if they do, I don’t want to meet them.
That’s where my fear sets in. Even if the current pro-Luchini approval rate is at 99.9%, I know it won’t be that way forever. Over the years, people will forget about how great the song was. Outside of “Luchini”, Camp Lo isn’t known for much, if anything. I can’t help but imagine that in 30 years they will be a blip on one of those all encompassing “Best songs of the Late 20th Century” compilations. You know like the ones they have now for the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s? Where it’s usually a couple songs by people that had legitimate careers and then a bunch of shit by people who you kind of remember, but not really without hearing the hit song first? I just know that’s where they’ll end up. It’s like, I have no clue who originally sang “My Boyfriend’s Back” and I don’t know if the answer is common knowledge for your average music scholar, but that song was way before my time. Even before my mom’s time. I’d bet that most people my age could sing along to that song but have no idea who actually sang it and most likely could give a rat’s ass if they ever found out.
I fear that I will be an old man on Planet Earth listening to “Luchini” on my The Target-Walmart Corp. Presents: Famous Oldies From the 1900’s Ronco Mp7 Compatible Implantable Data Chip (This will be the most common media format in 30 years of course.) while all the young earth people migrate to Space Disco Planet 7x in the Alpha Sector, which is the planet that named Pharrell Supreme Emperor of Disposable Club Bangers in 2032. Please God, let global warming kill me before it comes to this.

Raven Mack: Here's some quick facts before Mike DIKK's words get me totally tweaked out... Camp Lo, at least one of the dudes, was from Danville, Virginia, which is a gutted-out textile factories with plywood windows piece of industrial shit drug-addled town, and according to my man Boomer, you can see one of those dudes, or maybe even both, down in Danville at bars every now and then using their brief legend status to be a baller, a shot caller, with twenty inch rims on their Chevy Impala type. That is the American Dream to me, using your fleeting fame to get hooked-up with all sorts of crap you really don't need in your life, and exploiting that one coincidental chance where everything fell into perfect place and you were a God, for at least three-and-a-half musical minutes. Which brings me to the other interesting fact about Danville, Virginia. It's where Clarence 13x was born and raised, who had some other name I can't remember, and moved to NYC, and he fell out with Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam because it didn't allow Gods to get drunk and smoke reefers, so he founded the Nations of Gods and Earths, which is all that 5% hoodoo that is deeply entrenched in the rapping music. When I worked with a big weird black dude who called himself a "domestic terrorist crazy fuck the president type nigga" who had been in prison in New York for ten years telling me about 5%, it was good word-of-mouth legend. But now that you can read about that shit in stupid RZA books and on the internet, it's just regular shit that any dork can find sitting around bored. Not that I feel I'm better for my experiences, but I enjoyed that time sitting in some shithole house with this weird dude trying to tell me how chicken and rice was a "Rastaman lunch" and just the general interaction of another weird-assed human being as opposed to google searching your way into experience.
Which is brings me back to the paranoia Mike has planted in me. This is one of those awesome songs that's feel good and initiates interaction with your fellow motherfucker, making us all together Party People, who were oftentimes in the place to be back in the day, at least according to popular lyrics. And this club-banger society, which I can see growing and growing, and this doom forecast Mike speaks of, these are not Party People. But they think they are. It's the Glitteratus Conspiracy, where the chosen offspring of 33rd Degree Freemasons - Paris Hilton-style drunken socialites - get to handpick the Chosen - like Pharrell and that Travis Barker fucker, to create a master race of entertainment-based opium for the masses, who have no means of actual access to that lifestyle, unless somehow one of the inner circle drunken socialites become infatuated with your penis, which won't happen because they only date Greek shipping heirs or Parisian boy models or pop punk singers. Us and Star magazine, strip club songs, VH1/MTV reality shows, and Carmen Electra's dance instruction tapes are different forms of this process, and it's sad when you see a brainwashed Manchurian Fat Joe throwing dollar bills around in a blank-eyed growth from his earlier form. We are doomed. It is why I voted for George Bush in 2004 because if the world is bound to be fucked, I'd much rather it just go ahead and be fucked as fast as possible instead of taking baby steps towards every waking minutes being mental torture.

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