Steve 'Flash' JuonI first discovered Rolling Stoned while compiling music for a new episode of The Hip-Hop Shop. That goes to show these episodes can be just as useful for me as for the visitors each Tuesday, even though free downloadable podsafe music every Tuesday is hard to argue with. Of course the shows wouldn’t be very good if I wasn’t being selective about what’s worthy of inclusion, and the song “Boom Boom” certainly fit the criteria. I really dug the choice of John Lee Hooker’s hard rockin’ blues song as inspiration for their track. True to the spirit of the original, the rappers talk about a woman that’s killer hot, but true to the spirit of their smoke there’s a lot of double entendre and pharmaceutical allusions:
“I’m the only one with it, so if you want it come get it
You’ve been all on my di-dick since I was rollin my Civic
And now I’m ridin the Beamer and you be eyein the team up
Dyin to meet us, but I don’t even lower my tinted
If you don’t smell the ‘dro, you don’t even know that I’m in it
unless you telephone your hoe and hear the phone when it’s ringin
She busy – but she’ll be home in a minute
In a good mood to clean and cook food instead of hoein and bitchin
Wake up, and smell the crack, when you go in the kitchen
I’m mixin the baking soda with all of the fixins
I’m fixin a plate that oughta calm all your addictions
Don’t smoke it, just put it in your tape recorder and listen
And get twisted”
Most of the album’s songs are far more blatant and far more blunted. Even their “Intro” is a woman preparing a recipe with ground up marijuana leaf as one of the ingredients, although she’s sure to stress that her preparation is for medicinal purposes only and NOT recreational. I doubt that Rolling Stoned cares. They claim a variety of afflictions on the following song “Medicated,” including a case of glaucoma for which they’ve “gotta see a doc-torrrr,” making sure to have their papers to prove it when pulled over. The members of Rolling Stoned – Marii Jane, Salazar, Shottie & Joey Duz – have an interesting chemistry beyond the chemicals they’re ingesting. Verses are bilingual, switching back and forth between English and Spanish like early Cypress Hill songs. It can hardly be called surprising given that the love of sticky icky icky crosses all cultures.
“Space Cake” doesn’t necessarily make sense as a title, except that in not making sense it makes perfect sense. It comes from that sense of stream-of-conciousness free association one experiences while in a medically altered state. It’s the reason you can have a seemingly reasonable conversation while recovering from knee surgery in the hospital, only to be told later when you come down off pain medication that nothing you said made a God damn bit of sense. The electrical signals in your brain are misfiring in unpredictable ways, so while there’s no such thing as a literal “Space Cake,” if you’re +Rolling Stoned+ you can probably picture being so high you’d eat a cake in outer space – just reach your hand into the upper stratosphere and pull down a slice. They’ve got a lot of other metaphors for being that blunted though: “Angel On My Shoulder” sounds pretty high, and you’d have to be pretty far up in the air to grab the smoke of an erupting “Volcano Funk.”
It would be an easy mistake to make to try and read a significant political or social message into “Space Cake,” but unless that message happens to be LEGALIZE IT there’s nothing that profound. The closest they’d come to political activism is begging the cops who are harassing them to chill out and not “Blow My High.” Since they’re not operating on a level more sophisticated than Cheech & Chong, they have to at least be the best stoners they possibly can, and back it up with intriguing music. “One 2 Three Four” does both, and works on a humorous “eat my dick” level to boot. It may be that the song “So Addictive” is an apt description of the topic and the group, because there’s a harmless mindless fun to Rolling Stoned – and that too may be a double entendre. Weedheads will love it and even the non-smokers may want a slice of their “Space Cake.”