Side A
311-Down
Everclear-Everything To Everyone
Nine Inch Nails-The Perfect Drug
Next-Too Close
Dionne Farris-I Know
Men At Work-Who Could It Be?
Will Smith-Gettin' Jiggy Wit It
Charli Baltimore-Money
Master P feat. Sons of Funk-I Got The Hook-Up
The Offspring-I Choose
Smashing Pumpkins-Rocket
Goo Goo Dolls-Iris
Mitch Ryder-Devil With A Blue Dress
Side B
Red Hot Chili Peppers-Breaking The Girl
Sarah McLachlan-Building A Mystery
Smashing Pumpkins-Tonight, Tonight
snippet of Dave Matthews Band's "Crash Into Me"
snippet of Days of the New's "Shelf In The Room"
Cherry Poppin' Daddies-Zoot Suit Riot
Luther Vandross-Here & Now
Black Sabbath-Paranoid
Blues Traveler-Most Precarious
U2-One
somethin' for the people-My Love Is The Shhh!
Rose Royce-Car Wash
Annie Lennox-Walking On Broken Glass
Faith No More-Epic
Before I popped inVol. 5 for the first time in years, I had long associated it with being one of my least favorite mixtapes. I just remember there always being a level of disinterest whenever I reached into my bag of cassettes and pulled out that case with the 5. I still liked it, but I think it suffered from a lot of filler.
At this point, I was still in my phase where I recorded just about anything as long as I thought it was decent and I was familiar with it. Master P had made a few appearances on my mixtapes so far, but I could never cite him among my favorite artists at the time.
"Make 'Em Say Uhh!" is one of the highlights of his career as far as I'm concerned, but I can't quite muster up the same enthusiasm for his appearances on TRU's "Fedz" and Montell Jordan's "Let's Ride." At the time I wasn't aware of how important it was to the mixtape listening experience to be careful with the selection of each song. While noting the progress of these mixtapes since I started this blog, I've dealt with and overcome random song snippets interspersed throughout, the voices of DJs being heard for more than two seconds and songs at the end of a tape cutting off due to the lack of space. Now, it'll be interesting to see when I started limiting the tracks to songs that I deeply cared about and not just stuff I recognized. To be fair, I still think "I Got The Hook Up" has its charms.
I would also file "Building a Mystery" and "Money" into the same category of songs I tolerated but wasn't exactly over the moon about. Luckily, there are still some all-time favorites on here such as "Rocket," "Tonight, Tonight," and "Breaking The Girl." The only thing is that those songs were not from 1998, which probably helped to cool off my excitement about this mixtape knowing that there weren't any current gems on it.
I'm fully aware of how crazy this may sound, but my favorite current song on here was probably "Gettin' Jiggy Wit' It." I always thought that Will Smith was a solid rapper who had good comedic timing and if the lyrics were right, his delivery was impressive (yes, he copped Rakim's style for "Summertime," but he added so much to that record.) With Nas handling the writing duties and an irresistible Sister Sledge sample, it's hard to not have fun with this track. Hip hop was still struggling with accepting an increasingly growing mainstream aesthetic in the face of traditional underground values at the time, which made Will Smith's pop aping as far from cool as you could get, but all of the elements here just simply added up to an enjoyable record for me.
Following that, I think my second current fave on this tape would be "My Love Is The Shhh!" I was big into Timbaland's sound at the time, so anything using that stuttering drum pattern was cool with me. It goes without saying that it was used to better effect on multiple Ginuwine, Aaliyah and Missy Elliott tracks since it came from the originator, but it was all forgiven since I found the chorus catchy.
Ironically, "Too Close" is now my favorite song of '98 from Vol. 5, but I was not a huge fan of it at the time. I don't think I overcame my indifference to "Butta Love" at the time and it interfered with me being able to appreciate all of the joys "Too Close" had to offer.
What's even more incredible to me is that I'm pretty sure that I liked "Zoot Suit Riot" more at the time than "Too Close." Whenever I didn't hear the typical guitar-fronted song on rock radio, it immediately caught my interest. I didn't mind the swing revival of the late 90s, but I never took it too seriously since I rarely heard more than one song by a certain band on the radio.
Quick sidenote: I did have "The Perfect Drug" on Vol. 4, but I didn't get the song right from the beginning, which is why I felt the need to record it again. Hearing both volumes so close to each other, I think I only missed a few lines the first time around.
Around this time, I started to switch over more to some of the oldies stations. They didn't figure as heavily into my previous mixtapes since I had such limited space on those cassettes and I was more concerned with catching recent favorites, but dealing with 90 minute tapes had opened the door even further to more formats. I always liked the random placing of a song that was a decade old or more on these mixtapes because it reminded me of the joy of stumbling onto a song I only knew by its chorus or a certain riff. It's pretty easy to conclude that I probably relied more on the oldies for this volume since there were so few current favorites. I don't think I had ever heard "Car Wash" in its entirety before this, but as I soon as I heard those hand claps, I knew to immediately hit record.
While listening to it today, Vol. 5 wasn't as uninspiring as I remembered, but it lacked a certain magic that the previous ones had. I always equated this mixtape to a Sunday afternoon since it always felt like that time of the week was one of the hardest to find a song I liked enough to record. For a lot of songs throughout the volumes, I can recall whether I recorded them during the late afternoon, in the evening or during the day on a weekend. Sunday songs were usually the ones that I hadn't planned on recording, but decided to because it was familiar and I was in love with the process of hitting that red circle and monitoring the song. Vol. 5 was not recorded entirely on a Sunday, but that's just its overall feel.
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