Sunday Afternoon....

I must say my Sunday was good. I had some bomb food, the weather was great, hung out with some of the homies*...chilled, laughed, ate and maintained myself well hydrated throughout the day.

Such a good day had me reminiscing. The year was about 1990. I would go visit The Montebello Town Center a lot, with one main objective...to rack* and of course check out the ladies. My homie Besk and I would spend hours or days at the Town Center racking everything possible. Our normal times to hit the stores were during the weekdays around 10:30 AM when the stores were just opening, the crowd was almost zero, security guards were perhaps still in the employee lounge getting their coffee and complaining about their job to each other while the first-shift store employees were busy setting up the store for the day. So busy, that we'd get ignored. PERFECT. So with a little handheld demagnetizer that I had racked from a Bullocks we would casually remove the sensors and either place our stuff in large bags that we'd ask for from different stores or wear them under our clothes after trying them on in the dressing room. Mannnn, we'd walk out with jackets, shirts, pants, colognes, ties, high-end boxers...you name it. Not that I am proudly boasting about it - that just was the case.

Anyhow - well one of these days we walked in to a record shop. A little one located on the second floor near the end of the mall. It was in the east wing where the first Hot Topic (before it went to caca and turned rave) was at. It sat right above Hot Topic. As I schemed through tapes in the Hip-Hop section, I noticed this one tape. It had a fist pumping upwards and the name A Lighter Shade Of Brown with a pic of three Latin dudes wearing tight overalls and caps. A Lighter Shade of Brown? WTH was this? Wellllll, I racked it.

Immediately upon getting into Besk's Metallic Blue Buick Regal with Daytons, I popped the tape in. It initiates with the first verse of the Mexican Anthem and it cuts to it's first track. I was like, hmmmmm...ohkay..my head was kinda bobbing...next we heard "El Varrio" and I liked that song a little more. The third was "Spill The Wine", of course sampling Santana but then, towards the end, this song called "Latin Active", a song that had sampled one of my favorite songs, "Radio Activity (Lets Jam)" by pioneering freestyle rappers MC Frosty and MC Lovin C. It was a dope rap song that had a jammin* beat and I totally liked how this track had sampled it and how it was composed. The song also featured female rapper Teardrop, who threw in some dope lyrics too.



I became a big LSOB fan. I can claim that Besk and I were perhaps some of the first kats bumping them. Peeps* would get in our Buick (hahaha, I said our Buick but it was Besk's) and they would just rag and laugh at the music. I didn't care, I like them, they were Mexican as I am and they repped* for the browns* right?

These dudes really introduced the entire Latin Hip-Hop movement to me. Which of course, at that time, could have been counted by hand. This was also way before Kid Frost's "La Raza" was out. Even though Kid Frost was in the circuit doing stuff and being a breakdancer for L.A.'s first rap collective - Uncle Jamms Army

The guys of LSOB had some dope rap names. ODM which means One Dope Mexican and the other was DTTX, which means Don't Try To Xerox...meaning don't bite* or copy. Which by the way, XEROX doesn't mean copy, it is actually the brand name of a copy machine. It is just often used to refer to a copy of a document. It is much so like asking for a Kleenex as opposed to asking for a tissue.

Okay okay - back to why I am writing about this. Well these guys had another track on that album that was dope. It did not peak the charts until maybe a year later. The track was "Sunday Afternoon". The song has actually been played out. It has become the Sunday BBQ anthem. But often times I can think of it when I get home from a good BBQ with al the friends.

So here it is. "Sunday Afternoon" by A Lighter Shade Of Brown.



MAKE's GLOSSARY:

homies = word used to describe close friends or acquaintances or even those that we may kinda know
rack = to steal or borrow from a store w/o the intent to return. Commonly known shoplifting. It can also apply to borrowing from someone indefinitely
peeps = short for people. form of an abbreviation
bite = to copy (like I explained above)
jammin = to be good or like "it rocks dude"
repped = short for representing and abbreviated form indicating that it is coming correct
brown(s) = not any of the sport teams such as Cleveland or Chicago etc. It means Browns, as in referring mainly to those that are of or considered of Hispanic decent..oops, I mean descent