Doc Zeus wants a spaceship.
They say that memories fade as the ever-persistent hands of time perpetually tick forward. However, I’ll never forget the first time I heard that album.
It had been a particularly rough semester for me at Syracuse that February. I had grown a troubling habit of abusing prescription amphetamine psychostimulants to combat my self-diagnosed attention deficit hyperactive disorder. Meanwhile, my girlfriend had left me and my grades were failing with each pill I selfishly popped and my prospects become a college dropout became tantalizingly real. It was a time in my life that causes an existential cringe in my bones when I ponder it. I was incomplete.
I had hip-hop, though. Rap music was a constant companion – blazing through the tinny speakers of freshly-minted, pearly white 2003 iMac that my parents purchased for my 20th birthday over the previous summer. It was rare that you wouldn’t hear the titanic sounds of The Black Album, Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ or even Diplomatic Immunity emanating through the walls from my old dorm room in Haven Hall. Still… I had never found an artist that spoke to my sensibilities. I was like so many of my peers a decade ago – bored… lonely… socially awkward… alienated. The rapper’s I adored were slick-talking, rough-around-the-edges and women seemed to instinctively flock to them in ways that I could only envy. I was not that. I loved hip-hop but I felt the wounding pangs that it was lacking something deep inside – somebody that represented me.
Everything changed for me and for us all on February 10th, 2004. It’s easy to forget how groundbreaking it was a decade later – the seamless blending of genres, the soul samples, the easy, confessional lyricism, the moments of institutional rage against hip-hop’s oaken doors. Despite the artist’s humble beginnings, what was unleashed upon the public shifted the tidal ways of public sentiment that inspired a thousand careers of liked-minded kids to speak their own truths with their music. The artist was Eamon and the album was I Don’t Want You Back – an album that’s import is rivaled by few.
The Cleft-Chinned Prince of Staten and his seminal debut was revelatory for a confused kid without a country when it was released in my sophomore year of college. Eamon’s particular trade of hip-hop-inflected R&B – memorably branded “ho-wop” – was profane and direct and challenged the status quo of what was accepted in the mainstream of popular culture. Eamon, a child of Irish and Italian ancestry, made music that struck like a trident directly to the gut – refusing to take prisoners with its trademark frankness.
Who could forget the classic title cut, “Fuck You (I Don’t Want You Back),” that slashed at the throat of modern relationships with an intensity that perhaps only fellow Shaolin don Ghostface Killah achieved on his seminal “Wildflower.” “Fuck You’s” ear-worm profanity might have been the hook that made it beyond inescapable in the winter of 2004 but it was the zeitgeist-y take on man-on-woman interpersonal metaphysics that seemed so nakedly fresh a decade before. “Fuck You! I don’t want you back” was a battle cry for heart-wounded kids that learned you could express your feelings in the forum of hip-hop.
Meanwhile, I Don’t Want You Back’s sonics were as ambitious as they were innovative. Eamon dared to combine the rawness of hip-hop and the dulcet smoothness of doo-wop. A childhood listening to classic soul records from his doo-wop singing father and the rugged thump of hip-hop of his peers gestated to create a sound that was unlike anything heard at the time. Eamon spawned a lineage of artists that dominate the charts to this day. Kanye, Cudi, Drake, Childish Gambino and Wale are all among artists that we are left to ponder wouldn’t have happened if Eamon hadn’t blazed trails for an artist to be themselves in the genre.
As for myself, I can remember the album being with me everywhere as I found myself that wintery, collegiate semester. I remember hearing “Lo Rida” when I used a cheap, obviously forged fake ID to sneak into Faegan’s on a Thursday Night. I remember getting high to “Get Off My…” in my Toyota Matrix as we cruised Euclid Ave looking for a house part to crash on an uneventful Saturday night. I fell in love to “I Love Them Ho’s.” Soundtracks to your life are truly rare but I could feel myself becoming complete to the album. Thank you, Eamon. A decade later, you made an album that truly saved my life.
Wait… Oh, shit. This album came out on the February 17th? Fuckin’ Wikipedia.
