DanjLovesThe90s!

’96… what a summer. By then, I was starting to perform at showcases here-n-there, improving with the DJing, and generally enjoying my responsibility-free life. I wasn’t rockin’ with Aisha around that time, but I was off into other stuff (so to speak) and lookin’ forward to my senior year.

I still remember the last day of school, riding home on the bus listening to Lost Boyz’ Legal Drug Money. That same day, I went to my father’s house in Bel Air and chilled out there with my little younger brother Erin for a good 2-3 weeks. That was an interesting lil’ “vacation” because it was the first (and 5th, and 10th) time I smoked weed. It was also interesting because this nigga hung around all kinds of muh’fukkas. So we’d do anything from smokin’ with this grungy, Grateful Dead-shirt wearin’ kid to chillin’ with some lil’ rich girl who stayed in her parents’ liquor cabinet. It was some different shit for me, but I wasn’t mad at it.

I also spent a lot of time at Music Liberated on Saratoga St. that summer. That was where a lot of DJ’s around town went for records, because they always had them before most other stores. I was trying to make some kinda breakthrough by meeting people and getting my tapes heard, so I would hang out at the store, sometimes just to listen to records all day. I’d also occasionally make copies of a tape, go up there, and give them to everybody at the store for the fuck of it.

The one thing I remember most about the summer of ’96 was my homegirl Jada. At that point, she was the only girl I knew that I could talk music with, not to mention the only girl I actually liked talkin’ to for hours at a time. It was nothin’ for us to start a phone conversation at 10 p.m. and finally end it as the sun was coming up. It didn’t matter if the convo was about something as simple as how funny Chris Rock’s Bring The Pain was- we’d talk all night like we hadn’t spoken in years. We had lil’ sayings/inside jokes, passed notes in school all the time, and rarely went one full day without callin’ each other.

It’s wild in hindsight, because even though it never went past cool-level, everybody around us didn’t seem to wanna believe that. People in school SWORE we were GTD-in’, my friends thought I was in love with her, and her friends didn’t understand why we didn’t get together. I def. wouldn’t have minded, but we were just cool-as-fukk, because we had a lot of similar interests (and common enemies). Sometimes I think it was thisclose to gettin’ there… but a poor choice of words on my behalf deaded whatever chance existed, and from there things broke down FAST. By September, we were in the hallway at school exchanging “fuck you”‘s like ‘Pac and Janet in Poetic Justice.

There’s a GANG of songs from ’96 (including the seven featured this week) that always remind me of Jada to this day. I mean, I don’t sit around obsessing over her all the time, but the songs remind me because we always had the radio on in the background whenever we talked on the phone. I’ll always remember that summer for how tight we were. Well, that and the obscene amount of weed I smoked with E.

The Danj! Summer Seven Of 1996 (Want ‘em? Freakin’ click ‘em):

2Pac “Hit ‘Em Up”: I’ll always maintain that I was a bigger fan of B.I.G. than I was of ‘Pac. But damn if I didn’t play this to death. That rant at the end is timeless.

Case feat. Foxy Brown “Touch Me, Tease Me”: Young Inga meets some random new R&B cat, and a classic is made. And for the record, the faces this nigga Case makes in the video used to have me geekin’.

Jay-Z feat. Foxy Brown “Ain’t No Nigga”: More Young Inga! Here, she meets some random kinda-new rap dude, and a classic is made. Who coulda correctly guessed which one would end up being the bigger star?

Nas feat. Lauryn Hill “If I Ruled The World”: Nas might have caught a lil’ flack for going mainstream-ish with It Was Written, but he made it count with this joint (especially with Lauryn on the hook). I miss Ms. Hill.

Gina Thompson feat. Missy Elliott “The Things You Do” (Bad Boy Remix): Hee-hee-hee-hee-how-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee-HOW the hell did that line catch on like it did? Who knows, but this shit was hot.

LL Cool J feat. Total “Loungin” (Remix): Of course, I love most of those old ’90s-jack-the-’80s joints, and this might be one of my favorites. Who do you love?

Total feat. Puff Daddy “Kissing You (Oh Honey)”: More Total! This song never fails to make me nostalgic- even the video has “summer ’96″ written all over it.

AND IN CASE YOU MISSED ‘EM: The other Summer Sevens are HERE.

-D!