Because Coolio made a hit song, I got hit in the face
How the Grammy-winning rapper taught us about making peace
The kids today will never understand.
They won’t know what it’s like to hear a song on the radio and not be able to immediately pull it up on a device and listen to it. They won’t know what it’s like to wait for a trip to Best Buy to spend $16.99 on a CD for one song, just hoping and praying that the other 10 songs on the disc were just as good.
They won’t know. These entitled young people. They won’t know the frustrations of hearing a song they like but not getting the info from the DJ right away that they need. Who is this artist? What’s the name of the song? Is that The Fugees? No? Wait, Lauryn Hill went solo? What is going on? No. They won’t know a world without access to abundant information on every album, artist, song, etc.
The nineties were tough. There are songs I’m still discovering today that I never knew the title. There are CDs in a zipped binder I haven’t listened to in years. CDs I spent good money on for a song. One song. CDs I bought in the 90s.
There are CDs I hold on to simply because my $17 investment still feels wasted and part of me hopes I can recoup that money at some point. Like these silver discs might transform into valuable collectibles at some point.
These darn kids with their access to music from every decade with their phones. A phone! I used to dial out on a landline to an automated phone bank that gave weekly updates on music artists. Janet Jackson has a new album out? Cool! Maybe I can order it via a Columbia House mail-order catalog next month! These kids will never understand.
They won’t get it. Preach all you want about their easy lives, but these kids won’t comprehend having to sneak CDs into their homes to listen to because they know their parents wouldn’t approve. (Not that I ever did that with Korn or Bone Thugs-n-Harmony albums.) These kids can listen to anything (anything!) they want, anytime they want.
We didn’t have the “try it out for free before you buy it” option in the 90s. If you wanted a song for free from a CD you borrowed, you copied it on a tape. A CASSETTE TAPE.
There was beauty in singles, however. CD singles that featured at most four songs. Usually just two. It was usually a song you loved so much you’d spend five bucks just to put it on repeat while you drove around town.
It’s a darn shame that one of those CDs with just two songs on it got me punched in the face.
I’m not a fighter. Not now, and certainly not in 1995 when I was sucker-punched in the halls of my high school. And it’s all (okay, only partially) Coolio’s fault.
I’ve never been a fighter. That makes me sound like a mature pacifist. But mostly I’m a coward. I’ve never possessed the strength or confidence to enter arenas packed with brazen young men who seek to throw punches to determine their worth. I tend to shrink away when physical confrontations come my way.
But what does any of this have to do with Coolio, the rapper with the funkiest hair in hip-hop history?
Coolio was the rapper who first introduced me to West Coast rap. While other teens were already knee-deep into N.W.A. and the early Tupac albums, I was running around the halls of my middle school humming “Fantastic Voyage”. That was Coolio’s first single, an upbeat jam that didn’t take itself too seriously. Though how serious can a guy with the name Coolio really be? The cover of his 1994 debut album It Takes a Thief shows the rapper starting at the camera through a row of barbwire, but Coolio seemed like a relatively fun guy. Especially with lines like “You can’t help me if you can’t help yourself/ You better make a left.” You just have to hear it. The way he says the word left there….it’s remarkable.
Then came his monster song “Gangsta’s Paradise”, and the world changed. When I say the world changed, I mean my world changed. This song, THIS song gave me permission to fall in love with rap music. Sure, I knew some rap music before “Gangsta’s Paradise”, most notably from Vanilla Ice. and Snow’s classic jam “Informer” which I constantly rapped to despite not really knowing any of the lyrics. I do know he said something about a cardboard box and the word “boom boom” in the chorus.
“Gangsta’s Paradise” was one of the few rap songs to reach pop radio. (In other words, it was considered safe for suburban white kids.) It’s relatively clean and even has a gospel choir singing the chorus. It also didn’t require the parental advisory warning for explicit lyrics like so many other rap songs at the time did. (Except you, Fresh Prince. You kept “Summertime” nice and clean. Though you did cause me at too young an age to wonder what the word “aphrodisiac” meant.)
“Gangsta’s Paradise” was the featured song from the soundtrack for the 1995 movie Dangerous Minds starring Michelle Pfeiffer playing the role of an urban school teacher. The song is also featured in a trailer for the movie Sonic the Hedgehog. This digression tells you all you really need to know about how culture can mess up a song’s purpose. This happens too often to dive into here. Still, it’s worth pointing out that had Gangsta’s Paradise not been so widely accepted by suburban pop radio and had it not been featured in a film starring a well-known white actress it likely would not have gone triple-platinum and spent 12 weeks in one of the top two spots on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
But you’re not reading this for an elongated history of “Gangsta’s Paradise”, or Coolio, or West Coast rap, or the sanitizing of West Coast rap by pop radio. You’re here because you want to know why I, a mere teenage boy brimming with innocence, was punched in the face over a Coolio song.
It started when I borrowed a CD single of the song from a girl in my church youth group. When I say a girl, you’re thinking one thing, but don’t think that thing. I promise this was simply a friend. I mentioned CD singles before, but let’s dive a bit deeper.
So, brief lesson here: singles were, whether in 8-track form or cassette tape form or CD form a piece of music you purchased because you really liked one song. And because you only liked that one song you didn’t want to spend the $16.99 to buy the entire album when you really only wanted that one song. Sure, it usually had one other song on it, but it was always a throwaway song nobody really liked. I had purchased a few CD and cassette singles in my life by this point, most notably R.E.M.’s cassette single for “Everybody Hurts”. And if you think it’s a bit odd that a 13-year-old would buy that song, of all the R.E.M. songs, and then rewind the song 50 times standing in the bathroom just to write down the lyrics because I loved them so much, then consider my adolescent mind the equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting.
I borrowed the CD single for “Gangsta’s Paradise” from my friend and tucked it neatly into the front zipper pocket of my monogrammed L.L. Bean backpack (gangsta, indeed). At some point, a brutish classmate of mine stole it from said backpack.
I couldn’t tell you at what point I knew who had taken it, but I know that I only knew who had taken it because as I looked for it someone told me who had it. Now, me being all of 5 feet, 5 inches, and 130 pounds soaking wet, I wasn’t in a place to be uber-confrontational about the CD. But I knew it wasn’t my property and that I needed to get it back.
So what did I do? I took the passive-aggressive approach. Before class one morning, standing in the hall talking to friends, the thief was within earshot. I talked about the CD robbery from my backpack, saying just loud enough that the thief was probably someone who “couldn’t afford to buy it on his own.”
Whoops.
When attempting to remedy situations like this, it’s wise to not provoke the perpetrator indirectly. Because as soon as the bell rang and I headed to class, the thief walked up beside me and sucker-punched me in the left eye. I fell, looked up at him, called him the proper name for a female dog, and then continued to walk to class as I also brushed the dirt from my L.L. Bean backpack.
Truly, a gangsta’s paradise.
My recklessness with words was thought by some to be racist, which wasn’t even a point I had considered until later on. That wasn’t my intent. Though to be honest, I’m not sure where I thought my sideswipe of a cutdown was going to land me exactly.
Time passed. The thief returned the stolen CD and was disciplined. High school went on. I never fought again. Not that I really fought then. Again, I’m a peacemaker. Or at least a confrontation avoider.
Coolio had other hits. “1,2,3,4” was decent. “Too Hot” was okay. But Coolio never reached near the pinnacle of other West Coast rappers like Tupac, Dr. Dre, or Snoop Dogg. But it’s foolish to pan over the enormity of rap music in the 1990s and not make a full stop at this, this one all-consuming song that gave pop radio listeners a cleaner taste of what gangster rap was, what it could truly be. Pop radio was not ready for “Straight Outta Compton”. Pop radio was not ready for raw storylines like Tupac’s “Brenda’s Got a Baby”. But give pop radio a rap song free of explicit content and too many overt references to drugs and guns, well that’s a little easier to stomach.
I can’t be too critical of Coolio’s career. I also can’t be too critical of pop radio in the 90s. Their mission remains the same now in 2024: entertaining music that feels like sweet ear candy without diving into any real issues.
I can’t be too critical of the guy who stole the CD that wasn’t mine. We were 14. Or 15. In an age where music was not readily at our fingertips. In an age where, to understand stories behind songs, to get a clearer picture of artists, we couldn’t tap and swipe on a mobile device.
I also can’t be too critical of myself at that age. I was never meant to be a fighter. I come from parents who are strong but peace-loving. I come from a household that never felt broken, never felt much lower than middle-class.
And maybe that’s why “Gangsta’s Paradise” struck such a chord with me along with millions of other suburban white kids. It was dipping our toes into the water of a world we never could understand. We weren’t ready for the deep end. We were just looking to casually glance at a lifestyle different than our own. But sometimes life gives us more than a casual glance. Sometimes it punches us right in the face.
In September 2022, Coolio passed away. He was 59. His death was the result of a fentanyl overdose, though years of smoking and a lifelong struggle with asthma played a huge role.
Earlier in his career, he talked about struggling with addiction and how Christianity helped him break away. The cynic in me wonders if he really believed religion helped him get free because, in the end, it was apparent the demons of drug use still haunted him. But we all fight something. Coolio just dealt with it more openly than the rest of us.
The funny thing is, the most public fight Coolio had was about a parody. Weird Al Yankovic’s take on “Gangsta’s Paradise” didn’t amuse Coolio, even if it made millions of people laugh.
Years later, however, Coolio buried the hatchet. He recognized that Weird Al’s take on the song was just fun, a flattering revision of sorts. Coolio confessed he regretted the way he reacted to Weird Al at the time. An unusual act from any celebrity: humility.
Real men and real people should be able to admit when they’re wrong and I was wrong, bro.”
Coolio won the Grammy in 1996 for Best Rap Solo Performance. In later interviews, he’d point to the Grammy win as the highlight of his career. For a guy who had a life full of ups and downs, I’d say that win for rapping about a life of fighting is pretty impressive.
I’m not a fighter. But I know I can do better at heeding the advice of Proverbs 20:3:
It is to one’s honor to avoid strife,
but every fool is quick to quarrel.
And I haven’t seen the guy who punched me in the face in well over 20 years. I don’t know what he’s doing, where he’s living, or anything about what happened to him after high school. If I did see him, I’d apologize. I didn’t start the issue between us, but I certainly added fuel to the fire. And just for a good laugh, I might pull out my phone, go to Spotify, and listen to “Gangsta’s Paradise” with him. I wonder if he would be like me, amazed at how a song about gangs and division could bring people together.