Shaq Diesel, Joe

Okay, alright, what's the hook this week, Joey, what's the style of your album review? How are you going to write about this week's album in a way that excites you, something more than "this is good because" or "this is bad because," because that's boring as hell to write after doing it for 341 weeks in a row? It's not about telling anyone whether you think it's good or bad. No one gives a shit about that from you anymore. So you write something that excites you. And so what's it gonna be this week?

I'm going to write about Kazaam.

But you haven't seen Kazaam in over nineteen years, after seeing it in theaters during that long summer of 1996. Aren't you going to at least look at the Wikipedia plot summary before writing about it? Or else rewatch it, if you have the time? Because otherwise the album review's structure is gonna seem pretty weak.

Nah, I'm just going to wing it.

I am a child, and I am exploring an abandoned house, or something, and I find a lamp. No, a boombox! That was the modern hip twist in Kazaam, the genie's spirit was transferred to a boombox somehow, maybe during construction of the house, which has since fallen into disrepair, and this kid—me, I'm the protagonist of this review structured like the plot of Kazaam—I'm exploring the house, and I find the boombox, turn it on, find a genie. I also have a strained relationship with my father.

Shaquille O'Neal comes out of the boombox wearing a genie outfit. He says something funny. I'm a kid and I've lived my entire short life assuming that genies were the thing of fairy tales, and so I'm pretty amazed that such a thing exists, and that the genie that I'm just now discovering exists looks like a seven-foot-tall basketball star. He offers the requisite three wishes. I'm a shrewd little kid and I decide that I'm going to spread out my wishes over the course of, I dunno, 90 minutes or so, the length of your typical movie, but I'm in this abandoned house now and I'm excited and so I make my first wish.

Wish #1:

Now you might think that my first wish would be something like, uh, make candy rain down from the sky so that I have unlimited candy. But imagine how crazy that would be. Even at a young age I understand my addiction issues, especially with sugar, and know that unlimited Reese's raining from the sky is akin to the death sentence. Plus, imagine getting hit with a Snickers bar in the head over and over, talk about concussion. And the mice and cockroaches that would come out of these old walls when they sniff all that chocolate melting throughout a hot Brooklyn(?) summer in an abandoned house! Or else, what, am I organizing a large effort to cart all these candy bars out efficiently and store it all in temperature-controlled warehouses?

No, no, this time I'm wishing that I had never heard hip hop before. Think about it. Think about never having heard any rap song, and being completely unfamiliar with all its tropes, the production tricks, the record scratching and high-pitched sine wave patterns and heavy drums and braggadocio rhyming, and then discovering this. Shaq Diesel by Shaquille O'Neal. It would seem pretty revelatory, no? Instead of a competent vanity project. It couldn't be a watered-down version of the best of hip hop if you weren't familiar with the best of hip hop. That would've made for a real nice week, man.

I suppose that seems as shortsighted as wishing for two tons of candy to rain down into an abandoned house.

Wish #2:

See this is why writing a review around the plot to Kazaam was a bad idea, you don't even remember what happens after that candy scene.

Sure I do, the second wish was, erm, it was something to do with the kid's dad. Or my dad, since I'm the kid in this review, sorry, sorry. My dad is... absent? And at this point I have sort of a rapport with Kazaam, like he cares for me a little bit, and knows that the thing I wish for isn't going to help, like I wish that I get a letter from my dad, or that he gets my letter, something like that, and Kazaam performs the wish because those are the rules, but even so, he knows nothing's really going to change, that some fathers are absent and nothing can fix that, and so on. And I know this well in my version of Kazaam, so I wish for something else. I wish that I was good at basketball.

Because I want to experience Shaq Diesel in a way that I can relate to the subject matter. To be clear, the subject matter of this album amounts to: I am Shaq, I am good at basketball, and I'm really cool and confident due to how good I am at basketball. The desire to feel good about yourself is a universal human emotion, so I don't need to be good at any specific sport to feel that desire, and thus empathize with the album. I just think it would be interesting to approach the album from that angle, like, yeah, I too am good at this sport, and so, wow, this is what it feels like to excel at something, and to feel good because I excel at that thing.

Back when I actually was the age of the kid in Kazaam, like in real life (a real life that unfortunately features no genies), I felt uncomfortable around hip hop music. I would often describe music within that genre as "lacking humility." In retrospect, I think that this is a self-esteem thing, like, if I can't feel good about myself, then I don't understand why this rapper feels good about himself either. It was easier for me to be self-deprecating than to attempt to improve myself. I was very quick to tell senior citizens who commented on my height that, no, I did not play basketball, I was not good at playing basketball, even if they didn't ask. There's truth to that but the humility is exaggerated. I am not THE WORST at playing basketball, there's just a very short ceiling to my abilities. Like maybe say that I'm only slightly worse at free throws than Shaquille O'Neal.

But you can see how listening to 40 minutes of one of the all-time greats rap over and over about how good he is at basketball, how that might make me feel. Just... a little off, that's all. That's a me problem (ain't it always). Like I don't understand how a human being can operate like that, with that much confidence in your ability that you feel comfortable talking about it. It makes logical sense because the stats on the court literally back up what he's saying here, but I'm talking more about emotions here. If I was good at something, then I'd be pathological about downplaying that thing. It's a "me problem" because maybe at this point I don't feel like I'm really good at much of anything, and so I literally can't know what it would feel like to be really good at something and then want to talk about it. 

So fuck it, Kazaam, give me them basketball skills. I want to know what it's like. I was to excel at basketball, and I want to enjoy an album about excelling at basketball. I need to know.

Wish #3:

There's no way that the third wish in Kazaam was setting the genie free, because that's the plot to Aladdin, and the Disney version has only dropped four years prior, and that would've been too much of repeat in a genie movie over too short a period of time. But if it's not that, then I have no idea what the third wish was. I am wracking my brain but my Kazaam memories end with the vague, hazy one about the distant father figure. So I, being the young child in this movie now, have free reign to make it whatever I want.

I wish for a quadrillion dollars. Oh, did you think I was going to wish for something like "I wish I could go back in time and hear 'Watermelon Man' for the first time" or some shit like that? What, do you think I'm a fucking moron? It's money. It's always been money. Unlimited money would solve all my problems, and then solve all the problems that something like "unlimited money" would create. Only a stone-cold fucking dumbass is gonna have access to all the money in the world via the genie and then wish for a room full of candy to be pelted at them from the sky. I mean jesus fucking christ, what a fucking buffoon.

Ehh, maybe we should have a little patience for the little kid in Kazaam. He's just a kid. He's young and innocent and doesn't know how the world works. Who among us can't understand that? We've all been there. And yeah, if it wasn't for the money thing, I could definitely see a scenario in which I'm going back in time to experience that again, the innocence, the wonder.

I was thinking about that this week, more of like a tangent on my thoughts about this basketball hip hop album but still, thinking about it because of that "Watermelon Man" sample in "I Hate 2 Brag," those guitar notes from that Herbie Hancock burned into my brain from long ago, over 20 years ago now, the fourth track on a formative sample disc I got in a magazine one time. I heard that song so many times, and now here it is again, on a 1993 rap album by the guy from the Gold Bond commercials. The path is long and twisty but it does lead all the way back to my childhood, eventually, and that felt good, to have access to that path this week, in a rather oblique way, but still.

C'mon, though, I'm not wasting a wish on anything like that. Give me money. A quadrillion dollars is definitely enough to pay people to throw candy at me in an abandoned house, if I ever got the hankering to relive the 1996 film Kazaam, but, ya know, outside of a poorly written album review.

GRADE: 3 pukes out of 5

Wish #4:

Another movie I clearly remember seeing from my childhood, a genie movie called Shazaam, starring Sinbad, he pops out of a lamp and grants me three additional wishes, and this time, I'm wishing for.....