Guess Who

With Mother’s Day just around the corner, I was thinking of songs about mothers this week.  I thought about a legendary May 8, 1977 Grateful Dead concert, and the Mother’s Day rendition of Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried” from that particular evening.  My mom is a Paul Simon fan, so when I thought of my mom and the music we have shared together, I thought about Simon’s “Loves Me Like a Rock.”  But when I thought of songs about mothers in general, I thought of “Guess Who” by Goodie Mob from their debut album Soul Food, a song that made me further appreciate my own mother and my relationship with her.

Goodie Mob represented a different kind of hip hop when Soul Food was released in November of 1995.  Let us take a brief trip back in time to put things in context.

By the mid-nineties, gangster rap had become mainstream.  Hip hop was taking over the airwaves and gaining a large following among increasingly varied demographics. 

1996 may end up being the greatest year in the history of hip hop.  The Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac were both still alive.  Snoop Dogg was cleared of all murder charges in February of 1996 and began working with Dr. Dre on The Doggfather, released later that year.  Other albums released in 1996 included Nas’ It Was Written, A Tribe Called Quest’s Beats, Rhymes and Life, Outkast’s ATLiens, and Tupac’s All Eyez on Me.  Busta Rhymes released a successful debut album in 1996, as did Lil’ Kim.  Two other artists released debut albums that same year, artists you may have heard of:  Eminem and Jay-Z. 

Despite all the competition, 1996 was first and foremost the year of the Fugees. The Fugees’ album The Score was released in February of 1996, three months after Goodie Mob’s Soul Food. The Score peaked at number 1 on the US Billboard 200 chart, and by year’s end trailed only Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill and Celine Dion’s Whatever the Hell Celine Dion Was Cranking Out in 1996 in total sales. 

Hip hop had become so popular and mainstream in 1996 that a tour was organized, the inaugural Smokin’ Grooves tour, which broke new ground for hip hop artists.  Following the success of the traveling rock festival Lollapalooza, debuting in 1991, and the H.O.R.D.E Festival which kicked off the following year, perhaps it was only a matter of time before hip hop got its own massive travelling road show.  I saw the Smokin’ Grooves tour in August of 1996 when it pulled into Nissan Pavillion (as of the time of this writing Jiffy Lube Live), a forty-five-minute drive from Washington, D.C., with a lineup that included A Tribe Called Quest, Busta Rhymes, Cypress Hill, and The Fugees.  It was an enjoyable show that transpired without any kind of major incident, like every other show on the Smokin’ Grooves tour that year.  I’m certain that a white America only four years removed from the Rodney King verdict and ensuing riots had concerns about massive gatherings listening to rap music.

Maybe it was Goodie Mob’s edginess that scared off much of white suburban America, maybe it was their thick southern accents, maybe it was extreme competition from the other quality hip hop acts of 1996, but Goodie Mob did not enjoy the mainstream success they deserved immediately following the release of Soul Food.  This is not to say the album was a flop—it eventually became certified as a gold record and peaked at 45 on the US Billboard 200—but it deserved more.  Goodie Mob would become a very influential group, and with the help of fellow southerners Outkast, they would establish the South as a legitimate region for hip hop.  No small feat, given that hip hop music media was completely focused on New York and Los Angeles.  

There are a few things that set Goodie Mob apart.  Being from Atlanta made them outliers, but they were also outliers in their music and their lyrics.  At a time when a significant portion of hip hop lyrics centered around getting high, getting paid, getting laid, and occasionally murdering your enemies, Goodie Mob spoke about everyday life in their own Atlanta neighborhoods.  Goodie Mob stripped away the fantasy and focused on the reality, while asking their listeners to do the same.

Soul Food sets the table in the first thirty seconds.  The album kicks off with a solo organ in a minor key, a male voice improvising a few notes to warm up, a clearly audible cough, and then a chorus of male vocalists singing the following lyric in a spiritual tone fit for a Sunday service:

Lord it's so hard, living this life
A constant struggle each and every day
Some wonder why I'd rather die
Than to continue living this way

A far cry from both the bravado of gangster rap and the suburban, all-access friendliness of acts like the Fugees and Beastie Boys. 

Right from the outset of Soul Food, there’s a recording of actual live original music being played, rather than a sample.  The only sample listed on the Wikipedia page for Soul Food is "Passacaglia in C Minor."  I believe there are other samples on the album, but the music on Soul Food consists mostly of original compositions performed by real musicians.  And "Passacaglia in C Minor" is a far cry from James Brown, Diana Ross or P-Funk, as samples go.  Turns out Bach hits pretty hard.  Who knew?  Goodie Mob producers the Dungeon Family knew, evidently. 

The opening cough on Soul Food is a sampling (not a sample- it’s an original cough) of the low-fi production that is consistent throughout the album.  Soul Food lacks the West Coast production sheen of Dr. Dre, and that lack of slick production is purposeful.  No one is hiding anything.

In their grittiness and also the depth of their lineup, Goodie Mob were closer to forerunners Wu Tang Clan or N.W.A. than they were to most other contemporaries, but Goodie Mob set themselves apart by having a positive message.  Not only did they report what they saw, they thought things could be improved, without resorting to violence.  The name of the band itself is an acronym of sorts, from the phrase Good Die Mostly Over Bullshit.  They were not glorifying this fact, they were asking you to really think about it.  How did this cycle of violence come to be, and how can we prevent this situation from repeating itself in perpetuity?

In the mid-nineties, as an occasionally broke young white man bouncing back and forth between coasts and living in suburbia, I did not always relate to Goodie Mob’s inner-city-Atlanta message.  On some levels, I found Soul Food difficult listening, especially deciphering through the accents and local lingo.  But I also shared some common ground with Big Gipp, Khujo, CeeLo Green and T-Mo. 

I am not from Atlanta, but I am from Maryland, which has as its northern border the Mason-Dixon line, making all of Maryland  by some measure officially the South, though whether Maryland is part of the North or South depends entirely on who’s asking. 

I did not spend much of my youth in a “bad neighborhood,” but I was born in Baltimore and have seen a few of its rougher areas firsthand, sometimes by myself, sometimes at hours when perhaps I should not have been exploring.  I grew up surrounded by local news broadcasts where murder was a nightly occurrence, barely a lead story.  In a city where there are over 300 murders in a year, its fairly easy to become desensitized.  I can relate to being frustrated at hearing stories over and over of good people dying mostly over bullshit.

Listening to “Guess Who,” a song about moms, I can relate because I have a strong mother and grew up for the first nine years of my life without a father.  I never met my biological father. My mother, only a few years removed from a convent, receiving government assistance when I was born, pulled herself up by her bootstraps. Turns out the severance package for Catholic nuns is not that great. My mom made her life better, working full time as a schoolteacher while raising me in the process.  I’m not sure if I could have done what she did. It was not easy for her.

I never had to pick out a switch, but I did get spanked at home. I even got spanked in a store once or twice, the kind of thing that would be filmed by an aghast bystander and instantly end up on social media these days.  Cancel my mom?  Good luck with that.

Luckily, I never saw my mom handing over money on the other side of two-inch glass.  But I had frank conversations where my mother made it clear to me there were things she would bail me out for (I’m talking actual arrests here), and things she wouldn’t. 

My story with my mom is different than your story with your mom, but I bet there are similarities.  That is what “Guess Who” is about.  All moms are different, and all moms are the same.  The good ones anyway.

In “Guess Who,” we get to hear four different snapshots of four different moms.  One of them is a nurturing hard ass. One knows things you thought you kept secret.  One of them is like an older sister. One is struggling with significant health issues.

CeeLo’s mom, a firefighter, would not recover from her health issues stemming from a car crash unfortunately.  She died when CeeLo was only eighteen.  Soul Food is dedicated to her.

This blog post is dedicated to my mom.  Still to this day, the biggest player that I know.  Thanks Mom.  I would not have made it anywhere without you.

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