What was your favorite song in high school? Why did it resonate?
The radio crackles to life. It is full of heavily produced sounds. Bon Jovi, Madonna, Wham!, Phil Collins —artists I would spend my life with— dominated. Pet Shop Boys were ploughing a different path, New Order were living their Blue Monday ‘88 renaissance as dance music crossed the Atlantic.
Remixes were starting to appear, sampling, and scratching were sounds hitting the mainstream.
But alongside the radio —which I liked to explore beyond the Top 40 hosted by Mark Goodier and Bruno Brookes, it was Tim Westwood bring those Hip Hop sounds to the UK that grabbed my attention— I had the local library.
Run DMC popped up there one day and I was hooked. DJs and MCs captivated me, a world away from UK pop, and then a couple of years after that, a UK producer named Tim Simeon took all of those influences, mashed them together with a UK feel and Bomb The Bass took my 15 year old brain and gave it a sense of exclusive street cool (or so I presumed).
Aside: It was this or Back to Life by Soul II Soul, which crashed a London centric hip hop groove into the charts a year later.
“Beat Dis” by Bomb the Bass
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What are your thoughts?