Welcome to the newest regular feature here at True Genius Requires Insanity, the “Crate Dig.” As you may already be aware, we strongly feel as though it’s time to advocate a “back to basics” movement in music. We feel that instead of everyone being an innovator, that some of us need to be preserving the importance of original source material. To that end, the “Crate Dig” will feature members of the TGRIOnline.com staff, the “Hustlers of Culture,” digging through their mental crates to remember the songs that made them appreciate music. There will be some amazing, and yes, embarrassing choices here, but always the key impact is to remember when music was not something to be over studied, remixed, downloaded, forgotten and torn asunder. We’re remembering when music was simply a song you liked, and really couldn’t tell you more than a sentence or two why. Sit back, reminisce, and enjoy the building blocks of music appreciation.
Show me -The Cover Girls
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Song: Cover Girls – Show Me
Year released: 1987
Year “discovered” by me: 1987
Reason discovered: Freshest sound I’d ever heard
When I was nine years old, I had three musical favorites. Michael Jackson, Prince and George Michael. Everything else was good, but those guys were great. Rap was around, Motown was a huge influence, and I loved the teen pop of the day, but my big favorites were that triumvirate. However, one day, I’m in the car with my mother on the way to school, and everything changed. It was hip hop, it was dance, and there were horns everywhere. As I’ve chronicled in this column before, I was a GIANT nerd at this point, so suffice to say, I wasn’t exactly dancing to this sound, it was more like I was wildly gyrating and appearing to have the onset of a seizure. Seizing movements notwithstanding, I waited for Donnie Simpson, then of DC urban powerhouse radio station WKYS to identify this sound, and he said, that was “Show Me,” by The Cover Girls. I wrote it on the inside of my notebook, and from there on out, if I heard anything on the radio that remotely sounded like “Show Me,” it went on the inside of my notebook. Names like Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam and Stevie B soon joined, and then one day while reading Right On! magazine at the supermarket, I saw a pic of the Cover Girls, had a giant crush on the trio, and a name for this sound I loved: freestyle.
I became compulsive about freestyle. Being nine and in retrospect easily confused for a closet racist, I presumed that because Latinos were at the top of the heap in singing freestyle songs that I could find more of it on traditional Spanish speaking radio. I didn’t, but there, I discovered Celia Cruz, Tito Puente, Enrique Iglesias and salsa, merengue, bachata, cumbia and a plethora of other sounds.
Being a fan of freestyle, when Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam came out with “Head to Toe,” I was hugely into it, and was amazed when it freestyle went from something I JUST heard on the radio and saw on urban video shows like local CBS affiliate WUSA-TV 9’s Friday night “Music Video Connection” to something competing alongside and soon topping Poison and Richard Marx for #1 on Casey Kasem’s “America’s Top 10.” However, even though there were tons more, including TKA and related group K7 in later years, I blame freestyle and namely the Cover Girls for really blowing open the doors of dance music to me. I really got into the house of MARRS’ “Pump Up the Volume,” and much of Queen Latifah’s early work and the Jungle Brothers because I really loved hip hop/dance fusion. But something about the little extra of the Latin sounds in freestyle keps that sound fresh and exciting to me to this day.
With tonight being the largest night in the nascent history of moombahton, this Crate Dig, regarding how I got into Latin sounds felt appropriate.
Dale moombahton!
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