ok, is it ‘shake that thing miss caterpillar’?
or am i mis-hearing the lyrics?
it reminds me of my early days as a dj when i was obsessed with dancehall. there was a dancehall record store in stamford connecticut and i used to go there and buy 12 singles. the sad thing is that a few years ago i gave them all away. that is sad.
i had so many cool dancehall singles from the 80’s. pliers, lt. stitchie, nicodemus, shinehead, etc.
and with dancehall you could play the dirtiest songs because no one had any idea what they were saying, especially in the mid 80’s. even i had no idea what they were saying.
i would go out and buy dancehall singles, and they guys in the record store would laugh at me because i was buying the dirtiest records and i had no idea what they were saying.
and i was kind of a novelty, hanging out in the hip-hop and dancehall record stores in the mid 80’s. you have to understand, in the mid 80’s there really weren’t that many white people interested in hip-hop and dancehall. there was this one record store in times square (i can’t remember the name, unfortunately) and they would get boxes of vinyl that would disappear within seconds of arriving. dj’s would just wait around on delivery days to see what was coming in. i remember ‘eric b. is president’ coming in and people fighting over it like starving people fighting over food.
i wish i could remember the name of that record store. back when times square was dirty. even though i gave away my dancehall 12″” ‘s i kept all of my hip-hop and early house 12″”‘s. my prized hip-hop 12″” is the test-pressing of ‘sucker mc’s/its’ like that’ by run dmc. and i have the original 12″” of ‘psk’ by schooly d. and ‘top billin’ by audio two. and my first ever hip-hop 12″” (purchased in 1982, because i’ve been a vinyl collector for a long time), ‘the message’ by grandmaster flash.
‘the message’ and ‘new york, new york’ are still, in my opinion, 2 of the most powerful hip-hop tracks ever recorded.
ok, have a nice weekend.
moby
