DANGER SHE'S A STRANGER and TWO DOPE BOYZ (IN A CADILLAC)

Listen to DANGER SHE'S A STRANGER by The Five Stairsteps.
Listen to TWO DOPE BOYZ (IN A CADILLAC) by OutKast.

Greetings Earthlings! Today's pairing is a good example of OutKast making a good sample better. Danger She's A Stranger is nice, it's just let down by the tempo being kinda schludgy. Two Dope Boyz, on the other hand, is thrilling. This is the first track off "ATLiens", the album that OutKast abandoned most pretenses to gangsta rap and started getting weird ("weird").

Big Boi takes care of the tempo issues by causally speed-rapping the first verse, and Dre finishes the song with one of my favorite verses of his anywhere. More importantly, and this is the first time I've told anyone this, but Two Dope Boyz is a song that was stuck in my head for at least two full years, straight. A real earworm, one that I couldn't shake for anything. I'd lie in bed at night and replay the same two bars (I won't tell you which ones, so you don't catch it yourself!) over and over, semi-consciously. Even now that I've kicked it, I get a little trepidatious listening to the song. Have a good Tuesday!

Photo: Bystanders (2). (I took about 200 photos of the Five Boro Bike Tour Sunday, most of them blurry and bad. But I really like this one.)