6. 3 Years, 5 Months & 2 Days In The Life Of... - Arrested Development
"Ladies and gentlemen, there are seven wonders of the world. You are about to witness the eighth." So opens the debut of Arrested Development. Overstated? Perhaps, but it still remains one of the greatest rap albums ever put to wax. We all know "Tennessee" and "Mr. Wendal," but true appreciation comes from the "lesser songs," like "Give a Man a Fish" and "Fishin' 4 Religion." (They really liked fishy metaphors.) Speech's rhymes are so well thought out, his ideas almost contort back on themselves: "Lately I've been in a life like limbo/Lookin' out of a smudged-up window/We're not sure where our lives are going, friends/It's summer outside, but yet we're snowed in." This band also had the unique distinction of being the only hip-hip group featuring a septuagenarian, Baba Oje, who mostly just pranced around the stage and shook his stick a lot, like an angry old man yelling, "Get off my porch!"
Michael Perone has written for The Baltimore Sun, Baltimore City Paper, The Island Ear (now titled Long Island Press), and The Long Island Voice, a short-lived spinoff of The Village Voice. He currently works as an Editor in Manhattan. And he still thinks Michael Keaton was the best Batman.
