"Poison" / Bell Biv Devoe / The Millenium Collection

Anyone see this one coming? I didn't. I must have had a late night drunken nostalgia trip one night.

For a change, I'm going to try to approximate the style of Chuck Klosterman for this review, since I'm currently reading his latest book. If you get it, have fun with it. If not, well, this will make probably no sense. At all. (And , for the record, I love reading Klosterman, but his style is so easily satirized that I can't help but give it a shot)

"You never trust a big butt and a smile"

Have truer words ever been spoken in the history of post-neo classical hip hop? If you recall, Bell Biv Devoe came from the remnants of early 80's teenybopper supergroup and NKOTB precursor New Edition (minus Johnny Gill, who was, at the time, rubbing women the right way and Bobby Brown(1), who with every little step was using his perrogative to find tender ronis. But I digress).

The thing about this song is that it is malleable enough that your perception of it informs not only your relationship with women, but also your inclination to appreciate Alice Cooper and hair metal.

You see, around the same time as this slice of R & B (2) came around, Alice Cooper was blazing a comeback with his own song called "Poison". Not to mention a few short years previous we had tthe debut album of uber hair metal band Poison, which continues to give so generously to pop culture through Brett Michaels "Rock of Love" today. How, one may ask, did the cultural Zeitgeist of late 80's early 90's pop music come to this? More than likely, it's the result of the complete dilillusionment of Reganomics and the sudden appearance of Fargo's own most desireable bacheorette, Gina Covington.(3)

ANYWAY, as most things do, it eventually comes back to KISS. The "Poison" of late 80's pop music has its direct antecedent to the "poison" that KISS was supposed to implant in the minds of us born between 1965 and 1980. In one sense, it means everything, and in another, it means nothing. You can see Ronnie Bivins as a "Rapper", or as a rapper, and either way, he'll never be as great a "rapper" as Steven Tyler was at one point.

So, indeed, never trust a big butt and a smile, gentlemen...

Just ask Kirby Puckett.

(1) owner and possible originator of the greatest black hairstyle ever, the Fade, or, as we called it in Minnesota, where there were no black people, "The Gumby"

(2) or, to be exact, "Hip Hop smoothed out on the R & B tip with a pop appeal"

(3) Gina Covington was the girlfrind of my nemesis Chris Fallows at Black Hills High School, our crosstown rival. Chris had not only the beginnings of what would be known as a "pornstache" (and this was way before ideas like "meta" and "ironic" ever reached North Dakota - if they ever have), but also a hell of a first step of the dribble and the hand of Gina, the Fargo girl who what the nost desireable in the uppermidwest in the glory years of 1983-1986.