The Kent M. Beeson of Western Civilization

VARIOUS ARTISTS - “JUDGMENT NIGHT” SOUNDTRACK

It’s 1993.  The idea of mixing rock and rap is so strange, so out there, that it becomes the selling point of a now-forgotten Emilio Estevez/Denis Leary film.  It also becomes the soundtrack for one particular semester in college — one theater class, specifically.  I remember working on not one, but two short plays, collaboratively with two different fellow students.  (I don’t remember much about the first one, but the second, co-written with a smart & talented gal named Jennifer, was a beautifully unholy combination of Brecht and Dr. Seuss.  I don’t recall how it was received, but Jennifer and I laughed and laughed when we wrote it.  Good times.)

Anyway, I think nearly every song here, 16 years later, is pretty good (meaning, 4 or 5 iTunes stars, which guarantees future play), but what’s interesting about it is how each team-up approaches the then-novel idea of rock-rap.  Helmet and House of Pain take the easy way out; they break the song in half.  Sometimes, like with Slayer & Ice-T, the rock part overwhelms; the opposite happens with De La Soul & Teenage Fanclub.  (Remember Teenage Fanclub?  I sure will when I get around to relistening to “Bandwagonesque”, which I just ripped.)

But some are able to pull off the alchemy and merge into one seamless whole.  Sonic Youth art-damages a typical Cypress Hill jam and makes the trio sound a druggy as the blunts they rap about, while the Mudhoney/Sir MIx-a-lot collab sounds like if hiphop were invented in the Nuggets era.  These sounds are probably old hat now, what with Def Jux and whatnot, but they were genuinely eye-opening at the time, experiments with no guarantee of any positive results.  (Mix-a-lot seems to recognize this; he signs off with “Just lost my street credibility, y’all!”)

And then there’s Dinosaur Jr. & Del the Funkee Homosapien, who seem to have recorded their music in separate galaxies, launched the tapes into space, and they somehow, through the sheer grace of God, managed to ram into each other.  It so doesn’t work that it goes all the way around and suddenly does.