Luscious Jackson - Fever In Fever Out

Bahahahaha! Fever In Fever Out is next. I assure you, i did not assemble the list we're following on purpose. Don't feel bad if you aren't noticing the coincidences, it's a me thing. 

Luscious Jackson (it came from hearing a sportscaster mispronounce the basketball player's name) was a female Alt-Rock/Hip-Hop band. Not many people seem to know this, but Kate Schellenbach was a founding member, aka the original drummer, for the Beastie Boys. Luscious Jackson's first gig was opening for said Beastish Boys, and they were not surprisingly the first band the Beastlike Boys signed to their new label Grand Royal. The label only lasted 9 years because the Beastesque Boys couldn't afford the mounting debt the label generated. 

That brings up an interesting phenomenon that many people also don't understand. I know because all day every day i hear and read people loudly not understand it. You can't be a person and a business at the same time, money-wise. As a person you think about money as positive or negative, making money vs spending money. In business, there are no positive numbers, it's all debt. You can pay back that debt, or you can take on more debt, but it's all debt owed to other people. Obviously you can be self-employed and give your self a paycheck for all your hard work, but the you who pays your salary is a legally different person than the you who receives it. Person you gets positive money, Business you collects and spends negative money. Said a different way, the only way a business "makes" money is by taxing the economic exchange between its employees and customers. Profit = taxation on an economic exchange. If we weren't talking about an album, we'd continue on to the question of whether or not that idea magically works on its own ignorant inertia. Would you rather have a well regulated and impartial banking system leveraged across the entire range of interests inside the community, or would you rather have a million jackasses doing whatever whenever they feel like it? 

Instead, we're listening to a late-90s Alt-Hop album, so maybe we just leave it at business exists purely to coordinate the redistribution of commodities from one to many, and it only works if everyone is willing to meaningfully compromise. You know, like "technically we're a rock band, but we really enjoy rapping, so we're going to do both at the same time," or "we can't afford to publish 12 more albums if we're still trying to pay off the first couple." That does rapidly snowball into a pyramid scheme on its own magically ignorant inertia. With my naked ear i hear people of all persuasions constantly not understand any of that. 

So what's this fever, and how contagious is it? I dunno. What i do know is that this is not a Rock album that incorporates Hip-Hop, this is a Hip-Hop album using Alt-Rock as its source material for sampling. If you're thinking only in terms of modern battle-rap virtuosity, then no that won't make sense. This is super old school: urban, jazzy, sophisticated, sensual. Loops and beatwork, rhythmic poetry, grooves and varied perspectives. All i really know is that i feel spectacular, and it's a joy to just lie back and listen to it. 

So in that respect, let's brainstorm reasons why you might deafly hate it. Well, maybe you've decided you hate all Rap, though even the most die-hard Rap hater tends to admit they kinda like certain old-school corny 80s stuff. Maybe you hate women, but that's dumb. Maybe white women aren't allowed to Rock or Rap in your brain-o-sphere. That's even dumber-er, but whatever. Maybe you don't like things that sound jazzy but aren't Jazz. I guess that's a reason. Maybe it just doesn't stick in your brain. It doesn't stick in my brain (except for the ear worm that is Naked Eye), but neither does Moody Blues. Just because you have to be in a certain mood to enjoy it, doesn't mean it's bad. Yeah, no, there's no good reason to hate this. It's luscious and lovely. Maybe you just don't like truth in advertising ;)