A few summers ago, I started one of my mixtapes with a very specific, silly concept: a pair of elder millennial parents have a few drinks after dinner and start playing their kids the rap and hip-hop of their youth, but the songs get increasingly filthy and inappropriate, until the kids flee in terror and the parents are left grinding on each other in the kitchen:
A good number of these songs surfaced while listening to Confucius and Fresh bring more hip-hop stuff to their turns on “Old School Dance Party” or from watching the Vevo 90s channel on TV and drinking too much during the pandemic.
At some point in 2021, we realized that the channel was basically on a loop and that Marky Mark came on at about 10 P.M. every night. We became obsessed with the bullying nature of the way Marky Mark tells you to feel the vibrations, like he’s a trainer at the gym shouting at you. “Come on, feel it, FEEL IT!” (Compared to the way, say, Sam Cooke tells you to “Don’t fight it, baby, feel it.”)
We decided the key to understanding the “Good Vibrations” video is insecurity. Marky Mark has looked around at the cool people in the video and he suspects that it is he who cannot truly feel the vibrations. Marky Mark appears to be yelling at you to feel the vibrations, but he is really yelling at himself.
It’s a raunchy batch of music, but also a jubilant one, and perfect, I think, for post-election partying.
You can listen to the mixtape on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.
Filed under: mixtapes