Are You Really Sick or Just Faking?
"Sick Boys" REVIEW BY JOHN S. PULLEN
Yes Mom...it's contagious, and now they've made me sick too...sick with pride, sick with envy and sick of watching other artists create music that I wish I would have made. DAMN IT!
I found Jonathan Toth from Hoth by accident, surfing online thru the skate vids--youtube.com/user/jonathantoth--and watched him do his thing on the "Sick Boys VIDEO." Decent...for a mongo skater. The nose blunt slide over the BBQ pit and across the picnic table was nice, and the Ford F250 board slide was way blue collar. Like I said...decent.
But what held me there watching was the tune, "Mama got herself a little sick booooooooooy...yeah!" I recognized the Animals sample from "For Your Love" as soon as the keys came in, but during the second verse they dropped in Buena Vista Social Club's “Chan Chan,” and guess what. IT HAD THE SAME CHORDS. They doubled up on samples where one of the samples had actually borrowed from the other several decades before! Okay, I'm a nerd, but THAT SHIT'S RETARDED! It was stuck in my head all day. By the end of the song, (and it didn't end, they crossfaded it into "F*ck Yes!" which I ALSO RECOGNIZED as taken from Ray Simmons intro section in H-Street's "Shackle Me Not!"...who the fuck makes this kind of music?) I was looking everywhere for the name of the group, and I saw, [to listen to more: myspace.com/jonathanlivingstoncrucial]. THAT must be the artist...turns out it is...and it's Jonathan Toth from Hoth AND longtime skater friend DJ Crucial merging styles as Jonathan Livingston Crucial.
SO...I checked out Crucial's video called "Member That?" Another funny, homemade skate vid...with another wicked track. "Member That?" is Toth's take on skateboarding since the early 80's:
‘Member when the Gonz gapped Embarcadero,
or that stop sign shove-it by John Lucero?
That’s when the streets had those underground heroes, cause
vert had the accessibility of about zero,
Whoa. That was like reading my own history...or someone else's version who was watching me...and on the hook they put Chris Farley from the "Chris Farley Show" (on SNL) interviewing Jeff Daniels, stuttering "Member that? Member?...Yeah, yeah I remember..." and instead of cutting off the audience laughter, they TRANSFORMED IT TO THE BEAT. WTF?
I checked "Da Board" next, and watched a noticeably younger Toth and Crucial skating the Principia Lower School playground (where I'd played before as a kid!) over Intellect MC's raps about ollying off a launch ramp on the front page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1989...then Crucial ollies hurdles and Toth ollies up and over a small house...
IS THIS ALBUM OUT YET?
I FOUND IT! August 25, 2009 was the official release date, but i noticed a blurb somewhere about having the albums in stock already at Vintage Vinyl, ahead of schedule...314...721...4096...THEY DID! I drove 45 minutes from West County to U-City and picked up one of the first copies in the store...23 tracks (???) are you serious? I couldn't wait to get home to listen to the rest of the album!!!
The rest of the album made me angry...
They took samples from all the old school videos I'd seen and chopped them up and re-arranged them into a whole new sound, like a mix of underground hip hop and skate punk spat out of skateboard history...voice clips from John Schultzes, angry land owners, EVEN SOME BRYCE KANIGHT CLIPS FROM THE ORIGINAL "SICK BOYS" BY MACK DAWG PRODUCTIONS in 1988. They got the Earthworms playing alter-egos that sound like posers I know...this country fuck named Abe tha Babe does a rendition of "Born in the U.S.A." based on skaters being patriots because they fought for their independence in the sports world and won (?!?) In "Nobody Loves Me Like Nike Does" Toth rants about how Nike finally got their foot in the door of the skateboard industry after years of failed attempts...and in "Thank God" he breaks down one of his favorite skate spots at Delmar and Cardinal (where I've skated many times) and how the landlord tried to keep skaters out of his lot by locking the gates of the surrounding fence:
...the next day, when I came back, there was
lock on the back gate, their way of saying that we
can't skate, yeah, as if they didn't like our
fan base (hah) they went and censored our ad space!
I laughed long and hard, like the rap race.
Do they think they can castrate my man place?
Damn they, for ever managing to stand in the way of
play! I brought my launch ramp and jumped the damn gate!
Simple. I coulda made this album, but I didn't, and now I'm angry...I'm going to listen to this album over and over and over and over and over...and I'm going to be angry over and over and over and over and over...
Thank you sirs, may I have another?
I hate you,
John S. Pullen
