Spitshine your Doc Martens and get your sexy pants on because it’s time for another eardrum-tingling instalment of Retro Cassette Friday! This week things get funky, super-cool and fleshy with three fantastic plastic-encased gems of aural satisfaction. Let’s bite into it!

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Jamiroquai
Emergency on Planet Earth
1993

This week we head straight into 5^th gear as we start off with Jamiroquai’s very first studio album. This record is more energetic than a Jack Russel on cocaine wearing tiny paw-sized rollerblades.

It’s frenetic and fast paced enough for it to serve as a suitable soundtrack for your next dance-aerobics/jazzercise session. In fact I’m not entirely sure what jazzercise is, but I have a feeling this would be the optimum soundtrack for jazzercise.

Particularly groovy is the track Too Young To Die. You can get as high on the beat as you are from your sweaty jazzercise-induced endorphins.

Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch
You Gotta Believe
1992

What happened to band names like this? Kool and the Gang? Mary Mark and the Funky Bunch? Snatch and the Poontangs (it’s real look it up {maybe not at work though})? Gold. Now everyone calls their bands random selections of words like Warpaint or Glass Animals or Architecture in Helsink or just noises like Illy and Flume. What’s a Flume?! Why can’t you state your intentions to me in your title in a concise and phonetically pleasing series of slang terms like Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch?!

Anyway. I really like how these guys have a really tough image despite being called Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. It’s such a poetically stupid name that I just can’t get it out of my brain. Oh Marky Mark. Marky Marky Mark Mark Mark. Now it’s lost all meaning. Come on, Soph. Review some music for God’s Sake. You can do this.

This is some awesomely cheesy 90s hip hop pop pseudo masculine nonsense that feels real good. It features some seriously shithot saxophone in ‘I Run Rhymes’. Like it says on side B, there Ain’t No Stopping the Funky Bunch! Except in the case of Mark Wahlberg’s acting career. Such a waste. Why, Marky Mark? WHY?!

Fine Young Cannibals
The Raw & the Cooked
1988

We recover from the loss of Marky Mark from the world of squeaky clean American hip hop with Fine Young Cannibals.

Their first track is met with cries of ‘I love this song!’ and ‘Oh! These guys!’ all around the office. It’s She Drives Me Crazy, which is evidently one of those songs that everyone knows but not everyone knows who plays it.

This album is a tasty boppy eighties number with rad keyboard solos balanced out with some mellow doo-woppy goodness in Tell Me What. Definitely worth busting out your good denim for. Plus check out this bizarre/brilliant film clip.

Sophie Joske

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