100 VINYLZ: #98 - Another Sign 12-inch by Schoolly D

(1994, Ruffhouse Records)
Schoolly D is a hip hop living legend. I know the standard rap dork meme is "hip hop's original gangster," but whether or not that is true is unimportant to me. He dropped Saturday Night, where he drew the cover on notebook paper (or at least it looks that way), which is where people got killed on wax for the first time, to paraphrase every rap historian's stupid book ever. But beyond that, he dropped Am I Black Enough For Ya and Smoke Some Kill, both of which took black nationalism to a different level entirely. Shit, Smoke Some Kill is one of my all-time most played tapes ever, a classic from start to stop. Oddly enough, he had a track on there called "No More Rock-n-Roll" where he declares an end to the rock era, of course over top a classic rock guitar sample.
All that history is what led me to buy this "Another Sign" single by Schoolly when he was well past his prime. It was on the same label as Cypress Hill, and produced by Joe "the Butcher" Nicolo, who helped Muggs create that weird rock-n-roll/rap hybrid that helped Cypress Hill hold top spots in the High Times 100 for years. But I think this song is one of the most classic, unheralded rap/rock hybrids songs (aka rack-rop, which is also how Koreans with Down's syndrome say "laptop") to ever be. The beat is laid back as fuck, but the guitar is pure studio electric guitarism filtered heavily through someone who had been digging on the blues lately. And Schoolly's lyrics are beyond revolution, beyond caring. He's given up and doesn't give a fuck anymore, but not in a "I'LL SHOOT ANY MOTHERFUCKER ALIVE" not giving a fuck but more of a "sigh... I guess I'll get drunk tonight and sleep on the couch and maybe tomorrow if I'm lucky I'll die." It's a great song, and not often remembered in the normal hip hop nerd memes regarding Schoolly D, because it came out after Schoolly was considered relevant. I still play it whenever I'm on one of my moody ass fuck-the-world kicks.
I remember watching Space Ghost one night all blazed up and Schoolly D was on that bama. On one hand, shit like that makes you think, "Cool, they got some wild shit up on the TVs nowadays," but on the other more realistic hand it just means you're an old ass washed-up piece of shit that's moved into a more marketable demographic of your life. It's like that cell phone commercial with the dude wearing the Motorhead shirt but talking like a prep school faggot in theater class. There's nothing cool about that commercial, but it does point out to you how uncool you are now, for even sitting around on the couch long enough to see that shit, so you might as well give up and buy the useless shit they're trying to sell to you. What the fuck else are you gonna do until you die? Get drunk and sleep on the couch? Ha! Yeah right, you've got to work in the morning, you fucking square.