Over the past two months and a week, I’ve moved around a lot. I went from a college dorm on Long Island, to Connecticut, to Seattle, to Europe, and back to Connecticut. Today I moved (temporarily) to the lovely Borough of Queens, which Wikipedia says is on pace to take over Brooklyn’s title of most populated borough in a couple of years. I’m cat & apartment sitting in the Kew Gardens area, which is a cute, quiet, seemily safe neighborhood. In order to properly begin my month in Queens, I’d like to post a song from one of my favorite artists from Queens.

That’s right. LL Cool J. Okay, so perhaps “favorite” is blatant exaggeration. As I mention in my musical history, I did go through a period of wanting to fit in while I was in 8th grade and the first year or so of high school, and listened to a lot of rap and r&b in my attempts to do so. But LL Cool J did manage to catch my ears even before then.

LL Cool J: “Doin’ It” (download)
It was ’95, and the lip-licking rapper conquered the airwaves and MTV with his raunchy ode to intercourse. I was in fifth grade, and I loved this song. Partly because I was young and anything remotely dirty was enough to make me giggle, as I was still very naive about most things sexual, and partly because it was a good song to shake your booty to. When I was younger, I never really bought rap/r&b CDs because I didn’t expect to like entire albums, so I just bought the CD singles. One day, my mother stumbled across my CD single of “Doin’ It.” Since the song title makes the subject matter painfully obvious, I didn’t dare try to pretend that it was about something else. My mother was never one of those mothers who freaked out and became all protective at any hint that her daughter knew anything about sex. So, instead of freaking out, she teased me. She used to randomly start moving her hips while mockingly singing, “doin’ it and doin’ it and doin’ it, yeah.” I don’t know if she meant to strip the song of its sensuality in my ears, but now, every time I listen to “Doin’ It,” that’s the visual that comes to mind.

Harvey Danger: “Cool James” (download)
Title aside, this song actually has very little to do with LL Cool J. However, I figure it serves as a good segue into the post I’m going to write about Harvey Danger in a few days. You know you can’t wait!