Sorry for the delay guys! Never knew I'd be rounding out my bottom 10 with some Internet detective work on a one-hit wonder from twenty years ago, but there we are. Let's just jump right in, but first...
*ahem* *ahem*
61. LET ME CLEAR MY THROAT
Average score: 5.126
Highest scores: 1 x 10 (
@WowWowWowWow )
Lowest scores: 3 x 0 (
@ModeRed ,
@Daniel_O ,
@CasuallyCrazed )
Chart positions: #30 Hot 100, #21 Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs, #4 Hot Rap Songs, #28 Rhythmic Songs
Year-End Hot 100: #96 (1997)
Who? Oh yeah, them...
Well, it had to happen eventually. We've had artists with quite substantial careers behind them and a lot of Where Are They Now material on here previously, but now we have DJ Kool, who almost completely falls off the map after his big hit. No matter. There are ways to get an entertaining post out of that. So we may as well begin by summarizing the very scanty history I could find for the man born John Bowman in Washington DC. DJ Kool specializes in go-go, a stripped-down and percussion-heavy style of funk native to the Washington area, into which more of a hip-hop influence crept over time, and that's where he comes in. He got his start in the 80's, performing around the city and working as a warm-up DJ for popular local go-go band Rare Essence. Come the 90's, he began releasing records of his own, and while he was a local star for a while, he wouldn't come to national recognition until “Let Me Clear My Throat”. After the 1996 album of the same name from which it came was re-released by Rick Rubin's American Recordings, it made it into the Top 40, and also found popularity in Britain, reaching #8 – unusually, the more popular version was a live recording from DJ Kool's performance at the Bahama Bay club in Philadelphia, which is quite different to the album version in that it only contains one verse and otherwise consists of call-and-response chants. And... um, that's about all I can say for backstory.
Hmm, what else to do to fill space... I know what we can do, we can talk about the two samples that make up the track! One sample is the opening fanfare from Kool and the Gang's “Hollywood Swinging” (naturally, the Kool family takes care of their own), but the other one gets more complicated. That's right, we have a case of Sampleception on our hands. What DJ Kool actually sampled was a sax loop from DJ Mark the 45 King's 1987 song “The 900 Number”, which was itself a sample from Marva Whitney's 1968 funk track “Unwind Yourself”. The 45 King sample's shown up in a couple of other well-known songs: you may also recognize it from this 1990 UK house hit...
...or for the younger hip-hop heads, from this 2011 single, God rest its creator's soul...
So it's a sax loop with quite a history behind it. I also want to draw people's attention to the “Old-School Reunion Edit”, the one that got played on one of our Plug.dj sessions, which gets us another
OHW CROSSOVER by featuring Biz Markie and Doug E. Fresh. For keeping that tradition alive, DJ Kool, we thank you.
So what do I think?
7. You know what? Time for me to drop my usual bullshit intellectual pretense. Because as far as party rap songs go, this one is pretty damn good in my opinion, if perhaps too long in its running time for the small number of ideas that it has. It's something of a throwback to the really early, block-party days of hip-hop (as shown by its taking its name from the Beastie Boys' "The New Style"), where the purpose of the MC was nothing more than to get the crowd hyped up and the whole place rocking. And for as undeniably dumb as this song is, it does have just the right amount of sheer energy to set that tone. DJ Kool's raw, rough voice also works really well over the stripped-back beats, and this does sound like rather a fun night out, thanks to his infectious hypeman presence: in a way, he reminds me a bit of Lil Jon in that, and while you may disagree, I find that to be no bad thing. I don't particularly want to listen to “Let Me Clear My Throat” just sitting in my armchair, but it bloody well goes
off in the right setting, and I'm rating it based on that – unlike “Whoomp!”, it achieves what it set out to do, and that's all I really care about.
Where Are They Now?™
Follow-up single? Hah! There wasn't one. “Let Me Clear My Throat” was the final single from DJ Kool's album of the same name, and he only has one more album, entitled
Gimmie Dat Beat and released the following year. It's just a compilation of well-known go-go songs, selected and remixed by him. And after that, as I mentioned... DJ Kool almost completely disappears. No “where are they now”, no interviews, no retrospective appearances, no nothin'. And you know what that means: it's time to do some research. *dons dinner jacket and sunglasses* So, follow me as I track down this international man of mystery, who the top brass know only as......... DJ Kool.
First off, DJ Kool proves to be an absolute expert at defeating Google, because when you just search for his name, you mostly get results about DJ Kool Herc – curse you, founding father of hip-hop, for having such a similar name! Mr. Kool does not appear to have a Twitter account, so that's one avenue to find out what he's doing now unavailable to me. He does have a Facebook page, but it doesn't help me much – it's very infrequently used (twice a year if that), hasn't been posted on since January 2017, and his biography is evidently copied straight from Wikipedia... and bizarrely enough, it also lists his Wikipedia page in his
contact details. There is a contact for his press agent on there, but I'm not prepared to go to such lengths to find out more about him. (HI I AM A POPJUSTICE FORUM USER CAN I INTERVIEW YOU FOR A THREAD ABOUT ONE-HIT WONDERS FROM THE 90's? Yeah, that probably wouldn't really work for him...)
In another news article I dug up, it mentions that he had collaborated with Mark Ronson, but checking on Discogs, I cannot find any such collaboration there, or any mention of such elsewhere on the Internet. Discogs also mentions a “djkool.org”, but that site no longer appears to exist, and according to Wikipedia, where it is also linked, it was a “fansite” anyway, not an official website. The Wikipedia links also take me to a Yahoo biography and Musicmatch guide, which both don't seem to exist now either, and to a couple of Youtube videos – one has been taken down, and one is only two minutes, from 2010, potato quality, and tells me precisely shit-all about what he's doing now. Discogs does show that DJ Kool's done some other stuff over the years, popping up now and again in this and that. He guested on Redman's 2000 single “Let's Get Dirty (I Can't Get In Da Club)”, which you guys will of course know as being the basis for “Dirrty” a couple of years later, but it only scraped the bottom of the Hot 100; on Mya's 2006 single “Ayo!”, meant to be the lead single for the much-delayed
Liberation, but that song didn't end up on the record when it eventually came out; and on two tracks from Will Smith's final album to date, 2005's
Lost and Found... the European special edition bonus tracks, no less. But most importantly of all, he made a guest appearance on “Hit the Floor”, from THIS album.
Yeah. Seriously, off the back of this rate, I should start a “hilariously stupid rap albums” collection, with this and
Mickey Unrapped as the centerpieces. Did I mention that this album came out in 2003? And that it has a diss track towards Hulk Hogan and an R&B tribute to Mr. Perfect? Because it does.
So let's go hunting in the local press. I refined my search results to local news from the Washington area, and got a bit more out of that (including discovering that he had been written up in a short article in the
Washington Post in 1994). I found a TMZ article from 2014, but it was was just a quick “here's what he looks like now!” thing like they do. Finally, I got a
Washington Informer article from last year, about him celebrating his sixtieth birthday. So now we have our answer: he's still working as a kool DJ, and doing his bit to keep the hip-hop and go-go circuits in Washington alive. According to that article, he is also the official DJ for the Washington Fusion, “the newly formed global mixed-gender basketball team”. And the very best of luck to him in it, I say.
Our man of the hour at the party in question.
OVER TO THE PEANUT GALLERY
Let me clear my throat... TO GOB AT THIS SONG!
CasuallyCrazed (0): This doesn't even qualify as music.
(Poor Marva Whitney.)
ModeRed (0): Cannot emphasize how much I dislike this.
yuuurei (1): - How annoying, what is this.
("Let Me Clear My Throat" by DJ Kool, if I recall correctly.)
Seventeen Days (3): Jock Jams material. Hard pass.
DominoDancing (3): Uh...no. Boring, slightly annoying beat. Doesn't give me anything to work with.
DJHazey (5.5): That beatbox sound is defintiely iconic, otherwise just kind of there I'm afraid.
(Of course! You get Biz Markie and Doug E. Fresh together, the beatboxing is gonna tear the roof off.)
Empty Shoebox (1): One point for the 'Hollywood Swinging' sample. That's All.
(You gotta say, he utilised it a lot better than Mase did.)
Auntie Beryl (3.1): Let me refresh my browser.
(OH SNAP)
