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I remember Loc being this Joe Camel character and Loc'ed After Dark was, in 89, easily one of those first hits. Here is my review:
The tragedy of some albums is that, in the A&R process, some of the best music on an album gets completely dwarfed by the best chance at radio success. Such is the case for Tone Loc’s Loc’ed After Dark. In listening again for the first time in, easily, a decade, I’m struck by the polarity throughout the album. How it can be, at times, horrid (“Funky Cold Medina” or “The Homies”) and other times incredible (“Loc’ed After Dark” or “Cuttin’ Rhythms”). And, in figuring that the two songs that put this album in the tape decks of mini-vans across America represent (debatably) the two more unlistenable songs on the album, it makes for a complex listen.
Look, in the pop world, there’s rarely any credit given 25 years after the fact. The pop machine moves too fast. I asked a kid at work the other day if he had heard of Tone Loc (who was only six years younger than me) and he had no clue. That would be to say that even the ripple or halo of Tone’s monumental success had completely vanished even despite a sophomore effort just two years later. She moves fast. You can go from top of the world to barely B-list status just like that. Tone Loc wasn’t the first and certainly wouldn’t be the last.
So we have this debut album that came, really, out of left field on Delicious Vinyl. Delicious Vinyl, a relatively new label at the time, had very few other projects going at that time. Tone Loc was their blue chip. They had been working up singles for this guy going back to 1987, preparing for this moment when the full length album dropped. And, when it did, Delicious Vinyl would never look back.
The album itself is carried largely by the production as Tone’s lyrics are largely not even his. We all know now that “Wild Thing” was written by a then-unknown young emcee named, well, Young MC. And if his hits were ghostwritten, who’s to say the whole thing isn’t really Tone’s? And if you look at the lyrics to, say, “Loc’ed After Dark” which finds Tone flexing with:
Now I battle posses and tribes alike
Never battle out of hate, I always battle for spite
Cold jealous of me, the west side man
The leader of the brothers and killer of the Klan
But I don’t give a shit ’cause my rhyme is legit
Cold put you in the yard and tie you up with my pit
‘Cause when she starts to bite, that’s when I will ignite
The views of the party taken to new heights
I consider myself to be a part of the elite
Suave and debonair because the rhyme is so sweet
…to “Cutting Rhythms” where he spits the “ram-a-lam-a-ding-dong, bigger than King Kong, I’m on the mic and still got it going on,” it reeks of the kinda inconsistency that would suggest at least some ghostwriting at work.
But the production provided by the team of the Dust Brothers, Mike Simpson and Matt Dike help provide a bed of varied hip hop listening from DMC-ish rock sampling to full on trunk-rattling bass music. It’s a toasty sampling of some of the more imaginative hip hop to hit the pop world at that point in time. Of course, as it would go, people didn’t give a shit about the deep album cuts that actually make the album better than it’s current bargain bin status. But, I guess you could say, that’s why we listened to it for a week. To pull out those deep album cuts. “Cutting Rhythms,” “Loc’ed After Dark,” and the phenomenally simple but effective “Loc’ing on the Shaw,” there’s enough meat on the bone here for a second listen. http://sonofbyford.com
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