

The film is based on the autobiography My Posse Don't Do Homework by U.S. Released in 1995, Dangerous Minds told the tale of a white teacher who gets a job at an inner-city high school in Palo Alto and inspires the at-risk minority teens she teaches.
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It’s a gritty lover’s quarrel, it’s played for laughs, but he also slaps you in the face super hard in the first 30 seconds.Dangerous Minds may have slipped into movie obscurity but Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” video is still iconic today. Was it a pop hit, though? In a 1995 Rolling Stone profile, Coolio talked about how, after “Fantastic Voyage” blew up, he worried that he’d alienated his core audience, so for the album’s next, and last, single, he picked the much grittier and funkier “Mama, I’m in Love Wit a Gangsta,” a duet with the rapper LeShaun-who you remember, perhaps, from LL Cool J’s “Doin’ It”-in which Coolio plays a guy in prison and she plays his possibly unfaithful girlfriend on the outside. It Takes a Thief, the album, debuted and peaked at no. And musically, his lane appears to be escapism, even if there is quite a chasm, physical and metaphysical, between what many of his newly minted MTV-bred fans might be escaping and what Coolio, himself, is escaping. Also there is the matter of Coolio’s hair. The mysterious gentleman with the cane and the pink suit who transforms a bicycle into a Chevy Impala convertible, which Coolio then drives, cue the on-screen treasure map, from Da Hood to Da Beach, and then hundreds of partygoers emerge from the trunk of the Impala. But the video for Coolio’s “Fantastic Voyage” is where Coolio truly shows you where he’s at. 3 on the Hot 100, does not so much sample the Dayton, Ohio, funk band Lakeside’s 1980 hit “Fantastic Voyage” as commandeer it. Which he does in 1994, with the release of his debut solo album, It Takes a Thief, which kicks off with an ecstatic and unifying little tune called “Fantastic Voyage.” His charisma, his buoyancy, his lighthearted aura, his copious star power, all of this will work both for and against him, as he becomes a star himself.

Coolio understands the pitfalls, the stereotypes inherent to the assignment. By their perception, I mean the slack-jawed kids watching MTV. Coolio gets that the Rap Is Not Pop debate is in part about perception vs. Maybe it’s hindsight that makes me say Coolio already sounds like a star, on a song like “Ain’t a Damn Thang Changed,” but Coolio already sounds like a star.Ī house that I don’t own and no respect on the street. Dre’s cousin Sir Jinx, who’d already worked a ton with Ice Cube. WC was the leader and fellow rapper, producers included Crazy Toons and Dr.

That’s Maad spelled M-A-A-D for you Kendrick Lamar fans. Coolio debuted, as a legit recording artist, on 1991’s Ain’t a Damn Thang Changed, the debut album from the L.A. He started rapping seriously in the late ’80s he hadn’t settled on a rapper name yet until one day he’s fucking around playing a little guitar or something and one of his friends says, “Who do you think you are, Coolio Iglesias?” Ergo. God had plans for me, so he made me stop.” As he later told Spin magazine, with regard to crack, “I didn’t quit through firefighting.
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In his early 20s he struggled with crack addiction he got clean, in part, by moving up north to San Jose for a spell to live with his father and work as a firefighter for the California Department of Forestry. He had some youthful association with the Crips he turned to theft, to burglary, in his adolescence, and he turned 18 while in jail for attempting to cash a money order associated with an armed robbery. Born and raised in South Central Los Angeles. Louis? Do you take a hit rap song less seriously if it makes you want to dance, if it’s funny, if even the white kids are dancing, if the white kids are laughing? Who gets to laugh, and at what, at whom? This conflict did not originate with Coolio, but few chart-topping, fun-loving rappers of the ’90s did a better job of unifying America, and pretty much nobody found that experience more alienating.Ĭoolio was born Artis Leon Ivey Jr. Is a rap song less credible if it crosses over to the pop charts, or more to the point if it crosses over to all the white kids at the roller rink in St.
