Shamrocks, Shenanigans & Smiling
Before Luka Bloom treated us to an Irish interpretation of LL Cool J’s seminal I Need Love in lilting Kildare tones that was to become a classic in its own right, we had a man called Everlast.
Not prone to wearing suits at weddings, the last time I wore a suit in Dublin I was unemployed. Being the pre-Celtic Tiger era, job interviews were rare so I decided after the interview to enjoy the novelty and swan around in my pinstripes for the day, trying to imagine what it would be like wearing a suit in my home town if I actually had a job. Had I known that within three years, centuries of mass unemployment, emigration, and suit-wearing, would all go out of fashion I’d still be there now.
Wanting to work and stay living in my city, I tried to inject some Nationalist Karma into my job hunting so I visited Kilmainham Jail for the umpteenth time. There are few more sacred Irish sites, what with it being where James Connolly was shot and, well you know, all that stuff happened. Knowing then that the Irish heroes of 1916 were on my side, I was walking to the Phoenix Park in my suit and my goatee, when a group of kids, aged about ten or eleven, asked me, in that shouting Dublin way:
-Hey mister! Are you in the House of Pain?
And more than ever I wanted to not emigrate. To those kids I so wanted to respond:
-Put on your shit-kickers and kick some shit
Or at the very least toss out a dismissive:
-Jump Around!
But instead I smiled and admitted I wasn’t in the band. Two weeks later I stopped smiling and boarded the ferry to England carrying my suit.
Over in Lawrence, Kansas, MJ Allen in Corn on the Macabre wrote a fine piece this last weekend reminiscing about The House of Pain, and that song. I found myself smiling again:
In the second verse of Jump Around, Erik Schrody, also known as Everlast (please let the irony not be lost), claims to have more rhymes than the Bible’s got Psalms. The Bible, in fact, has 150 Psalms. One-fitty may be a lot of Psalms for a bible, maybe the most of any bible; however, I am fairly certain that to maintain a successful hip-hop career one must have significantly more than 150 rhymes. When Mr. Schrody claims to have more, just how many more does he mean? 152? 160? This is still insufficient.
And yeah I know Black47 and Sinead O Connor were among the numbers championing Hip-Hop even before Everlast’s pre-House of Pain stuff, but that wasn’t my point.
See Also:
• How Do You Find America?
• Feast or Famine: Emigration Assistance
• USA & Ireland: Little Differences #3 - Robins
• Songs I learned in School in Ireland
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