Word: rocke
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Start with the pain. 'Cause we all know pain is what makes things funny. So start with the hurt, back when comic-actor-author-ad pitchman Chris Rock was li'l Chris from Bed-Stuy, just another black kid from a poor black neighborhood bused to another poor section of New York City because the school there was mostly white. Go back to the white kids spitting on him, week after week, calling him n______ this, n______ that, picking fights. And poor white kids, he says, are tough. They're not like your suburbanized white kids; they got all this...
There's the pain. Years later, when Rock was 25 years old and on the stand-up circuit, he turned the experience into a punch line. "Ain't nothing more horrifying than a bunch of poor white people," Rock joked in his act. "They blame n_______ for everything... 'Space shuttle blew up! Them damn n______, that's what...
...like to be a "life-minded" musician. The album is a beginner's triumph whereas the live performance ends up being a muddled, lusterless array. While a concert portrays the band in constant, labored transition without a coherent identity, Into the Sun represents an entertaining range of rock styles from contained experimentation to guitar pop. Although there are shades of the recognizable John voice in Sean, he never fully appropriates his father's style...
What makes the album uniquely Lennon's, though, is his penchant for enigmatic lyrics. His messages verge on the opaque, although the main theme almost always becomes salient by a song's last note. On "Home," a meld of late-era Beatles and guitar-heavy modern rock, "The broken glass that fades/The past is a parade of countless days/Painting patterns in the sand" vaults Sean out of escapism into confronting his legacy in order to move on. "Mystery Juice" is an exception to the rule as Sean makes himself completely indiscernible: "They stole the show and towed the rowboat/Though slow/We...
...emotionless. Lennon never even eked out more than a smile. Bright vocals buoyed the performance a bit, but the mood of the show came crashing down when the band broke out in a Beastie-like rap tune and then followed it with a Satan-core metal shriek fest. Rock bottom suddenly took on a whole new meaning...