Go, DJ Bobcat, Go! (LL live on SNL, 1987)

Oh look, it's the best 80s rap song with a guitar sample being perfomed live on Saturday Night Live in 1987 with LL being backed by both Cut Creator and DJ Bobcat :

LL Cool J - Go, Cut Creator, Go



DJ Bobcat was a problem. Not even because he managed to make Cut Creator surplus to requirements on his own vanity cut while his turntables weren't even plugged in, but because he could throw those mean Marty McFly air-guitar moves to the Johnny B Good sample bit.

Although 1987 was a vicissitudinary year where Eric B. & Rakim, Public Enemy, Boogie Down Productions, Ultramagnetic MC's (okay they didn't release an LP until '88, but Funky, Mentally Mad, and Bait proved that Ego Trippin' wasn't a flukey one-off moment of genius) and EPMD (like Ultra, they didn't release an album, but It's My Thing, You're A Customer, and Strictly Business was a pretty damn fine trifecta of songs to begin their career with) planted their feet firmly in the door, make no mistake that rap in 1987 was still LL's house. Rakim had the Dapper Dan outfits but he also had that Belle & Sebastian stage presence and unlistenable Eric B. album scratch tracks, Kool Keith didn't really blossom until '88, KRS still looks a bit too Everybody Hates Chris whenever you see him in early BDP footage or the Going Way Back video, Erick & Parrish's appeal lay in that they were 2 average hoodlums rather than kings of the city, and Chuck D still dressed like a Yugoslavian who'd just got Raising Hell and Spraycan Art for Xmas in 1986, so I don't think it's too unreasonable to proclaim LL the coolest rapper of 1987 since he was the complete package at that point.

Witness his total domination of the stage as he prowls it in front of the Brads and Beckys who make up SNL's audience, and check him out jumping on and off a painted box while still managing to look bountifully badass. Shit, Drake can't even skip across a stage twice the size of this one without going arse-over-tit and turning into his dainty frame into the body of Sabu.



(^^ Never gets old ^^).

Of course, only a fool or a contrarian would claim that Bigger And Deffer is as good an LP as Criminal Minded, Yo!, Bum Rush The Show, or Paid In Full, but its high points - the subject of this post, I'm Bad, Get Down, and My Rhyme Ain't Done - are as glorious as any of the 1987 Eric B. & Rakim, Public Enemy, BDP, Ultramagnetic MC's and EPMD classics, and LL had a secret weapon up his sleeve that year when he casually placed the greatest diss record of the decade on the B. side of a single which was taken from the soundtrack to a completely forgettable movie conversion of a Bret Easton Ellis novel. I know I'm supposed to bookmark any mention of Less Than Zero with a caveat that Downey Jr was good in it because he was living the role here, but fuck that. He was much better in Weird Science, and the only vaguelly enjoyable thing about Less Than Zero is that Jami Gertz/Star from The Lost Boys is in it.

LL Cool J - Jack The Ripper



Damn, LL, you were the illest. How you gonna end up playing second fiddle to the hack Robin from the 2 Schumacher Batman flicks?