EDIT: Had to throw up some Paul Reiser love in honor of his show premiering tonight.

So I was at a party last week where the DJ was dropping some solid nineties jams, primarily of a hip hop flava, which admittedly wasn’t really my cup of tea back in the day.* Still, as I imagine was the case with most of the era’s adolescent white suburbanites, I did engage in a touch of hip hop crossover. Trip-hop most obviously, which received plenty of air time on my local radio station, but also the Arrested Developments, Dream Warriors, and Jurassic Fives of the world—you know, just the kind of forced eclecticism that probably irked serious listeners of rap to no end. Another of my fave forays into the realm of Hip Hop was US3’s 1993 hit, “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)”. Really more jazz fusion than anything else and belonging to that brand of upbeat, playful hip hop De La Soul rode to the Top 40 throughout the early nineties, “Cantaloop” was (and is) an easy like—a four and half minute essay on groove set to a sampled chord progression by Herbie Hancock and, in the song’s own words, some seriously funky horn. By the time the track was featured in 1994’s critically maligned (though occasionally hilarious) Danny Devito vehicle, Renaissance Man, it had climbed to #9 on the Hot 100 and been certified Gold. Beaucoup bucks indeed….

*Different story now, Def Jux being one of my favorite labels putting out any genre.