I wouldn’t say that I had made a conscious effort to avoid the musical output of LL Cool J, but I had certainly never made an effort to seek any of it out. Like many people in my age group, I was always well aware of his singles but none of those songs that I heard on MTV in my youth really attracted my attention the way that other rap music did in the 90s. I was much more interested in seeing Snoop, Dre, or anything remotely gangsta and foreign to my experience as a kid than I was in hearing some cheesy rap song about love (let me amend that - I am still more interested in gangsta rap than I am in love rap). When “Doin’ It” came out, I would have much rather listened to anything else at all but as a fifteen year old kid, I still watched the video because, uh well, dancing women. There was nothing I saw of LL Cool J’s output outside of “Mama Said Knock You Out” that drew me toward him. His growing focus at this time on acting certainly didn’t attract me either.
I pretty much forgot about LL Cool J, the rapper, for years until stumbling upon the track “Rock the Bells” randomly. After realigning my neck and calming my nerves, I allowed myself the possibility that maybe he wasn’t so bad. At this point, I was aware of his importance in the early development of hip-hop and I had decided to check out his early work. Then “Accidental Racist” happened (the rapper’s squirm-inducingly terrible collaboration with country singer Brad Paisley) and any goodwill LL Cool J had earned from me was obliterated. Let us take a moment to contemplate the lyric “RIP Robert E Lee but I gotta thank Abraham Lincoln for freeing me, nah mean.”
