Day 9: "All Boro' Kings" - Dog Eat Dog (1994)
The 12 people reading this blog every day (hi, and thanks, you are keeping me from feeling this is an exercise in complete insanity) will be glad to hear that today we're moving away from the Metal, Rap Metal and Nu-metal genres with this one.
Listen to me here
Yes, instead of Rap Metal today's album is from that other great mainstay of alternative early 90's music, Ska Punk.
I'm not sure Dog Eat Dog were particularly successful even back in the day when the world decided collectively that trombone sections and electric guitars were a perfect backdrop for 'skatepunk', which I think is shorthand for "the kind of songs that would definitely be on a Tony Hawk's Pro Skater Game". In the tradition of weird and slightly saddening discoveries I make when I am listening to these albums again, it turns out Dog Eat Dog aren't as long-gone as I absolutely assumed they were. I knew that they'd had two albums in the early 90's; this one in '92 and "Play Games" in '96 (which I never owned, but the friend of mine who this album is indelibly associated with definitely did), but what I only today discovered is that they have a new EP, released on May 15, 2017, called "Brand New Breed". In my head-canon, this is a band comprised entirely of the sons and daughters of the original lineup, taking the mantles from their fathers 20 years later.
I present my first and only piece of evidence to support my theory
When I listen to this album, I think of two things. One is my good friend Dorian, and the other, the awful dive bar where we'd dance to songs from this album. Me and D (as he's known to people who know him well) have known each other for about 28 years. With the exception of my immediate family and my oldest friend, D is amongst the human beings I have known the longest, part of an amazing group of friends I made at age 13 and have somehow conspired to hang out with to some degree ever since.
In that same way that my friend Alex is eternally linked to the Disturbed album I wrote about, this album makes me think of D. I guess it started when, as barely 16 year olds, we would go out to the Alternative Rock night in Chesterfield on a Tuesday night, which was held in the basement of a skeevy bar in the town centre. I'm sure its just as bad as any ten other damp-walled, sticky-carpeted, sweatfilled basement club with a dancefloor the size of a postage stamp, but I always felt that Monty's (the colloquial term for its far more elaborate and misguided full name "La Monmatre") deserved a special place in hell for the quality of the drinks it would serve. If you arrived at 11pm or later, you paid the cover charge of one whole pound to get in; arrive at 10pm, and you could enjoy 50p-a-pint drinks for an hour. Arrive at 9pm when the club opened, you could endure 10p-a-pint hour, where the pints were "whatever we collected from the drip trays the night before". I swear to god, one night I came back from the bar and my flat, yellowish water-disguised-as-beer had a SKIN on the top. It makes me shudder just thinking about it.
Because we went literally every week, we were unafraid to ask the DJ to play the songs we wanted because, well, we wanted to hear them and screw everyone else. We eventually got to know the DJ well enough that, whenever the club started to empty out, he'd play the songs we requested. I can't remember whether D had encountered "No Fronts" before we started requesting it, or if the DJ had played it once and we'd latched onto it like teenage limpets, but it soon ended up heavily in the requested rotation, sending the three or four of us who were there that night onto the dancefloor at 1.45am to thrash about like lunatics to the delight of no-one whenever it was played.
In the same way Alex adopted "Stupefy" for his fake wrestling persona whenever we talked fantasy wrestling (which was definitely a thing, and I'm excited because my adopted theme song is up in tomorrows post), D adopted "Who's The King" from this as his, which in turn just settled into my lizard brain to the point where its become sort of the theme song for the man himself. If I heard the opening trumpet bars to "Who's The King" right now, I would assume that D was not far behind somewhere.
I still manage to see him close enough to every week, which is amazing. Sure, there have been times when its been months where we've not caught up - the nature of diverging locales, dwindling free time and differing interests, but that's never made me feel like I couldn't call on him whenever the chance presented itself. He's changed an awful lot from the quiet 13 year old I met in the attic of Kingsley's house to play Dungeons & Dragons - he's been through a lot of stuff, and tackled it, if not always gracefully, then stoically and with great patience. He's amongst the most kind, loyal and reliable people I 've known.
And he is an awesome Doctor Octopus. Honestly. It's crazy how good it is.
