Soundtracked

They Want EFX

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This week's theme: One Hit Wonders

Alright...Day Two of "The Soundtrack of Your Life" ! Everyone's off to a good start...Team Fivesixer had 100% participation, so go us! Yesterday afternoon I started making a list (because I'm a list person) of 1HWs off the top of my head...and realized that most of them were gonna show up in other playlists as well. And someone (I forget who) made a good point on someone else's entry that even though we might pick the same songs, we all have different experiences with them...but being me, I'm more a fan of non-duplication. If that means I have to work a little harder to come up with songs no one else chooses, I'm cool with that. The more music- the more different music- the better!

See, as a teen in the late 80's- early 90's, it wasn't as easy as it is now to seek out and find new music experiences. At least for me it wasn't. There was the radio, and MTV, and whatever else your friends found...probably from their friends, or older siblings, or however they found it. And being a huge hip hop fan, my options were limited. I didn't want to sit through hours of pop radio to hear maybe one song I really wanted to hear, and I didn't have cable growing up, so besides going to my grandmother's house to watch Yo! MTV Raps and taping my favorite videos on VHS, I had to rely on magazines to learn about new music.

And I'm not just talking Rolling Stone or Spin either...I would pick up copies of Word Up and Rapmasters (I was most likely the only white dude in my neighborhood with Public Enemy and Geto Boys posters on my wall from those mags). I would read reviews, check out ads and articles, and then hit the mall to see if they had the tapes I was lookin' for (back then there was still a local chain that had stores in the malls before everything went corporate, and usually all the cool indie shops were downtown and weren't easy for a kid to get to on his own).

Das EFX were one of those groups for me. Lots of MTV play, decent write-ups and shout-outs from other rappers I was listening to...if you weren't familiar with them, you still might've heard them on the remix of Ice Cube's "Check Yo Self"  . But before that, they had a Top 10 Billboard hit with their debut single "They Want EFX" (and followed it up with my personal favorite, "Mic Checka"  , which didn't chart as high but still reached #1 on the Hot Rap Tracks chart). They may have also appeared on shows like In Living Color, which was another mainstream outlet for hip hop back in the day, but I don't remember and I couldn't find anything on YouTube (although I do remember Kriss Kross and Redman definitely being on ILC).

And if you still don't remember them, their choppy, herky-jerky style and flow influenced hip hip for awhile...ending words with "-iggedy"? That was Das EFX. You could hear it right up front a few years later in Blackstreet's "No Diggity"   (probably another great One Hit Wonder itself, but I wasn't as big into the R&B side so I wouldn't know for sure without looking them up, although I had that single too).

I wouldn't call them a direct influence on me, but listening to Dead Serious   did teach me how to become a little better with meter and timing, and that sometimes breaks as tiny as a gasp in a line could still happen and fit (even without the addition of -iggedy)...I could use syllables and pronunciation to my advantage, or just expand my vocabulary a little and retool words to make them fit in my own poems. Influence and inspiration all over the place y'all...you just have to know where to find it.

"I'm the supercalafragilistic tic-tac pro."
Lyrics.