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books

Positioning

This marketing book was suggested by a childhood friend and businessman named David Worrell. You can read his take on the subject in his post about lame business names. Great rant David. For me, the book is a much needed treatise on some of the most important principles in marketing. I have my own business and as you can probably tell, it’s not in marketing. I certainly always need marketing help.

To give you a feel for the definition of positioning, I’ll use a few quotes from the authors, Al Ries and Jack Trout:

The basic approach of positioning is not to create something new and different, but to manipulate what’s already up there in the mind, to retie the connections that already exist.

Today’s marketplace is no longer responsive to the strategies that worked in the past. There are just too many products, too many companies, and too much marketing noise.

Keep in mind, this book was first written in 1980 and revised in 2001. Even considering the update, they were talking about “too much marketing noise” before Facebook and Twitter were even conceived and Google was mostly a search company. If you want discussions about information overload, we have discussions about information overload. I’ve talked about it in detail in a post over at my business site. Ries and Trout use this great visual of a “dripping sponge”:

The average mind is already a dripping sponge that can only soak up more information at the expense of what’s already there. Yet we continue to pour more information into that supersaturated sponge and are disappointed when our messages fail to get through.

I find this interesting because when I wrote my post I was under the impression that this was new and groundbreaking science. But Ries and Trout have been making the same point about information overload for decades. Quoting from the book:

Scientists have discovered that a person is capable of receiving only a limited amount of sensation. Beyond a certain point, the brain goes blank and refuses to function normally.

So that’s where we stand folks, now more than ever. Getting someone to hear what you’re saying, listen to your pitch, or pay attention to what you’re selling, becomes more difficult every day.

Ries and Trout have the antidote with plenty of specific, albeit dated examples. They go through the details on advertising, communication, and public relations campaigns for companies ranging from Avis to Xerox, and many in between. Each is tied to a specific positioning principle.

It’s highly relevant stuff, but I need help thinking through if it’s more or less relevant now in the information age. Take this assertion for example:

Changing minds in our overcommunicated society is an extremely difficult task. It’s much easier to work with what’s already there.

Isn’t this even more relevant today? Not only are we bombarded with more information, but it’s easier than ever to find information that’s agreeable, that corroborates feelings and emotions already in place. So there’s a good case for it being even more difficult to change minds in this day and age. However, it’s not as easy to fool the educated consumer these days because information is a lot more accesible for those who know how to get at it. Can’t their mind be changed simply with facts and data? Can they even be swayed by positioning-speak like “we try harder” or “it’s the real thing”?

These are questions that a finance guy like myself needs help on. I would buy an update to the book. Heck, it could be valuable to look an line extensions alone. Ries and Trout are highly negative on line extensions, but they don’t seem to have lost favor yet. Gosh, the candy aisle is full of Dark Chocolate Kit-Kats, Pretzel M&Ms, and Snicker’s Peanut Butter. They seem to be doing alright, but I don’t have any hard data on that.

I have a feeling that certain assertions stand the test of time. Ries and Trout would still stand behind their idea that to be successful, a marketer has to deal with reality. What’s in the mind stays in the mind, it’s a monstrous task to change it. To do so you have to be skilful, analytical, creative, and subtle. Their six guiding questions are still relevant I think:

  1. What position do you own?
  2. What position do you want to own?
  3. Whom must you outgun?
  4. Do you have enough money?
  5. Can you stick it out?
  6. Do you match your position?

To answer these, the examples in the book help a lot. It’s a fast read. It would be a cliche to call this book timeless, but it very well could be.

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books

Harvest

You’ve heard me talk about my hometown before. Great town, although it’s been a rocky ride lately (you know, with the flood and such). But this small town has had some successes in the last few years – a National Championship basketball team and, heck, this book entitled Harvest. Harvest is a fine piece of work co-authored by a gentlemen who graduated with me from Findlay High School.

So in the interest of full disclosure, you should know that co-author Chris Younger grew up in my neighborhood and was a childhood friend of mine. Chris and his business partner/co-author David Tolson run an investment banking firm in suburban Denver called Capital Value Advisors.

This book spans the process of selling your business, which certainly encapsulates an important part of the services provided by Capital Value Advisors. It begins at the moment you simply contemplate what life would be like if you sold your business and ends at the moment you sign the closing documents. Tolson and Younger touch on everything you need to think about throughout this process. Everything. They go into detail on some things and mention others in summary, making it clear where they expect you, the business owner, to dig deeper. I think they nail the mix of detail and summary, concrete and abstract.

In fact, in terms of balancing weight/length with relevant knowledge, this book excels. It’s less than 200 pages and can be read over the course of a couple of days even by the most harried business owner. But I strongly suggest longer study and quiet contemplation of the content.

The payoff for reading it? I can imagine an immediate boost in confidence for small business owners as they walk into their first meeting to discuss selling their business. And confident they should be. By giving this book the appropriate attention, they’ve taken great measures to guard against any lawyer, accountant, banker, or consultant misleading them on any key aspect of the sale of their business. A confidence borne of knowing that they’re prepared intellectually and emotionally for what could be a long and taxing process.

In my work life, I’m associated with this industry. I’m a numbers guy with a consulting business focused on helping finance organizations in mid-sized enterprises do things faster and more accurately with fewer resources. This book is relevant for me because it clearly links the role of the finance organization to the rest of this process. Tolson and Younger go into a fair amount of detail on valuation, understanding financial statements, and capital structure. By the time any business owner is done reading it, they’re surely going to understand the value of rigorous and regular analysis of financial results.

Besides finance, the book covers other detailed, procedural items like:

  • Finding and hiring an advisor
  • Preparing the “book” that describes your business
  • The process of marketing your business to potential buyers
  • The legal document estate
  • Due diligence

And finally, Tolson and Younger throw in a wealth of “soft” information, real stories on the strategic and managerial side of things. They have chapters addressing these issues:

  • Are you (the owner) ready for this?
  • When is the best time to harvest?
  • Value outside of the financial statements
  • Dealing with deal fatigue
  • Communicating to employees and customers

In fact, I just purchased a handful of Harvest to have in hand the next time a client mentions something like, “I will probably want to sell this business someday.” It’s worthy of breaking out just for the glossary and appendices alone. The appendix includes a sample RFP for hiring an investment banker, a sample due diligence list, and an explanation of financial ratios. It’s rich stuff and written to appeal to a generalist.

Besides specific deal issues, I can envision it also being useful as a general reference for a variety of situations where strategy and finance intersect (valuation, performance metrics, and capital structure). Eventually, I’ll be writing more about this over at my business site. That is, when I actually start consistently posting over there.

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screen

Game of Thrones – Episode Two

So yeah, after watching Talking Funny, I hung around HBO a little longer and caught this hour-long episode of Game of Thrones. It’s an HBO series based on the books by author George R.R. Martin. I saw some headlines weeks ago about this HBO series but I had no idea what it was. I ignored them because we don’t have HBO and I don’t do TV series in real time. The only TV series I’m watching right now is season two of The Wire (2003).

Game of Thrones was cool. I read about one sci-fi/fantasy book a year and I think the first book of this series will be it. I would rather read it than watch it. Sure, if it’s great I’ll probably grab the video in a few years, but I read very little fantasy so I need to be highly selective. Heck, I’ve seen an hour of the story and I’m comfortable that the plot and characters appear interesting, so let’s do this.

I’ve heard it described as “Lord of the Rings for Americans.” I’m not sure where I heard that or why they said it. Martin is American, but the show seems to have a lot of British accents and uses the whole king and royalty schtick. Hmmm, whatever. I’ll know more in a few months. I’ll probably read it this summer, especially if I get to a beach or pool.

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screen

Talking Funny

I was out of town and it just so happens that the cable system in the hotel had TNT adjacent to HBO on the dial. So as I was watching the Heat clinch against the Sixers, I checked on HBO during commercial breaks. We don’t have HBO at home so it’s one of the few redeeming things about business travel. I got sucked in to this show and couldn’t turn it off. It’s just four comedians sitting around discussing the trade for an hour.

The four comedians are Ricky Gervais, Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Louis C.K. It appeared that Ricky Gervais was the ringleader/moderator and I think his company produced the show. It’s specifically about stand-up comedy. The topics ran the gamut, they talked about the engaging the audience, writing jokes, using profanity, style, delivery, getting started, etc… You name it. It was a rambling conversation and really funny.

I do love stand-up comedy, but I haven’t been to see any stand-up in years. It used to be that my wife and I would hit the comedy clubs a few times a year back in the 1990s. I don’t think we’ve been in ten years, actually. This makes me want to go back.

They spent about 10 minutes talking about profanity. Jerry Seinfeld has used the f-word during stand-up once in his life. Only once! He says he just doesn’t need it for laughs. He didn’t deride the word though and is not offended by it. In fact, he sounded like he was appreciative of how the other guys use it. If you’ve seen any of the others, you know that they are heavy users of the f-word.

Then they moved on the the n-word, which Chris Rock uses mightily. Now I’m not familiar with Louis C.K.’s comedy, but evidently he uses the n-word also. I gotta tell you, it was a little uncomfortable watching him throw it around during the show. You just don’t see white guys using that word ever. Seinfeld and/or Gervais commented with something like, “only you, Louis, can use the n-word.” I’m not sure what that means. I need to check out his comedy to get a better understanding.

I started following Louis C.K. and Chris Rock on Twitter. It doesn’t look like Seinfeld or Gervais use the medium at all. I have a comedy list on Twitter with a mix of popular and indie comics and it provides a ton of laughs on a pretty regular basis. I need to reintroduce myself to stand-up.

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books

The Name is Archer

I consume a fair amount of crime novels, but I’ve never read any Ross Macdonald. I happened in to this book because I was at a friend’s house and he just handed it to me. I started it within a few days, which I rarely do, but I was between works of fiction and didn’t feel like working down my backlog, so I launched into it.

This book is gritty, hardboiled detective fiction in short story format, published in 1955. It’s a great introduction to Ross Macdonald and his main character Lew Archer, a California private detective.

To give you an idea, in the story Gone Girl, Archer walks into a bar to inquire about the whereabouts of a woman. He’s greeted by a piano-playing barman who talks in rhymes. Unsurprisingly, Archer replies with a rhyme of his own:

Where did she lam, Sam, or don’t you give a damn?

That’s what I’m talking about, quirky, strange, with pretty spare prose, but great stories. So great in fact, that I’m going to read all of the Lew Archer novels in order starting with The Moving Target, which MacDonald wrote in 1949. It was also made into a movie with Paul Newman, entitled Harper. I just purchased the book on the Kindle (pleasantly surprised that Vintage has these in digital format).

I’ve rooted around a little and it appears that Sue Grafton was highly influenced by Ross Macdonald. That, my friends, is some serious validation for Macdonald because Grafton is one of my favorite writers (not that Macdonald needs any validation, but from my perspective…). I’ll have more about this link to Grafton after I’ve read The Moving Target.

I liked all the stories in The Name is Archer. They are dark and violent and mostly have surprise endings. There is also plenty of dry humor, like this passage from the story entitled The Suicide:

On the way to the diner, she caught the eye of every man on the train who wasn’t asleep. Even some of the sleeping ones stirred, as if her passing had induced a dream. I censored my personal dream. She was too young for me, too innocent. I told myself that my interest was strictly paternal.

I’m going to like this stuff a lot. I can tell.

Categories
music

Lasers – Lupe Fiasco

I purchased this on the heels of the Who’s Next. It was the same $5 album deal on the Amazon Cloud Drive. I purchased them both together. Man, what kind of human being walks out of the record store with The Who and Lupe Fiasco? It’s so much easier to do this stuff in the comforts of your own home so you don’t face the ridicule of friends and snotty record shop owners. I guess we all do things on the internet that we would never do in person.

I hope nobody finds out that I bought a Nicki Minaj single. Oh wait.

Fiasco is a Chicagoan and his musical style in this album is kind of pop-like hip-hop. There’s not much spoken word and in my limited experience with the genre, this album doesn’t feel like rap music. I do, however, enjoy the sound.

But before we dig into the music, I have this theory that he may have had an influence on Rashard Mendenhall and his recent bout of tweets. It’s just a theory, but bear with me. Fiasco’s song Words I Never Said has many of the same sentiments that Mendenhall expressed. They are both local and famous, Mendenhall from near north suburbs and Fiasco from the city, so I may be on to something. Here’s a sample from the track:

I really think the war on terror is a bunch of bull$&^%
Just a poor excuse for you to use up all your bullets
How much money does it take to really make a full clip
9/11 building 7 did they really pull it
Uhh, And a bunch of other cover ups
Your child’s future was the first to go with budget cuts
If you think that hurts then, wait here comes the uppercut
The school was garbage in the first place, that’s on the up and up
Keep you at the bottom but tease you with the uppercrust
You get it then they move you so you never keeping up enough
If you turn on TV all you see’s a bunch of “what the &*^#$”
Dude is dating so and so blabbering bout such and such
And that ain’t Jersey Shore, homie that’s the news
And these the same people that supposed to be telling us the truth

It wouldn’t be unheard for them to have met. Local stars in music and sports tend to run in the same circles. Mendenhall has taken his tweets down, but they both mention that building 7 stuff. I don’t know, I’m just thinking.

I wonder what advice Pete Townshend would give to Mendenhall. He would probably tell him to listen to Won’t Get Fooled Again and study the words. Pete would tell Mendenhall that wherever your information comes from, whether from the government or the activists, it’s probably not true. So just “smile and grin” and “pick up [your football] and play.” Take care of what you can control, your family and your job, and make efforts to guard against being fooled by the “old boss or the new boss.”

The music industry and Hollywood make comments like this constantly. Obviously, Mendenhall plays on a sports team that happens to appeal to a much broader audience than hip-hop, so that raises the stakes a lot. Hollywood and the music industry just get a pass on all of this stuff because it’s art, I guess.

Okay, back to the music. I would actually group this with the B.o.B and Bruno Mars types. I don’t own any B.o.B. or Bruno Mars albums, but they played on NBA All-Star Sunday. I’m not an authority by any stretch, but the voice and instrumentation trends towards more popular stuff, although the lyrics are a little edgier. I’m clearly a hip-hop newbie, in case you can’t tell.

I’ve gone through the album a few times. It’s good. I don’t know where it’s going to stand in my music listening life. I’m a little jaded trying to figure this music stuff out. I’ve spent about $50 on music this year and it’s been a mix of hip-hop, rap, rock, pop, alt-rock, heavy metal, and classic rock. I’ll listen to pretty much anything. I like pretty much anything.

Out.

Categories
music

Who’s Next – The Who

I think I’ve purchased this album three times in my life, so screw you music industry. But you know what, when I hit play and the distinctive electric piano thing at the beginning of Baba O’Riley starts, I don’t care. It’s worth it now, it was worth it before. I actually think I’ve owned this three times. I had it on cassette in the 80s. I had it on CD in the 90s. Now I have it digitally, in the cloud, so I never, ever have to worry about repurchasing it. Amazon is going to keep it backed up forever. And it was on sale for $5. That’s crazy. Just crazy.

Kids these days will recognize two of the tracks because Baba O’Riley and Won’t Get Fooled Again are the theme songs for two of the three CSI shows (New York, Miami). But for my money, Going Mobile is the best song on the album. I’ve always had a bias for Pete Townshend in the role of  lead vocalist. I love his voice and am especially partial to his solo stuff. It’s also a great running song (or driving, if you’re into that). But if someone were to argue and say Won’t Get Fooled Again is the best, I couldn’t disagree too much.

Heck, who am I kidding? Every single song on this album is great. It’s just a joy to listen to. Period. It’s one of the great listening experiences in life. Clear Top 5 of all time for me. This is especially true when you throw in the bonus tracks tossed in for the 1995 reissue.

It has some slow stuff, some bluesy stuff, and some hard rock. It has plenty of guitars and drums, but Townshend throws in a fair amount of keyboards, including electric ones (synthesizer is a keyboard, right?). Daltrey mixes in pure, clear vocals with throaty, rough sounding ones. Townshend pitches in on the vocals for a bunch of songs besides Going Mobile. There are so many great things about this album.

Behind Blue Eyes captures a lot of this different stuff. It starts slow with Daltrey’s crisp vocals, mostly acoustic guitar, and some choir-like background voices. And then with a minute and a half left, Daltrey’s voice changes and the guitars and drums fire up. Everything gets more aggressive for about a minute. The finish backs off. It is a beautiful song.

The original album finishes with eight plus minutes of Won’t Get Fooled Again. It’s strong. The long guitar riff and electric keyboard start things out, the guitars and drums enter, and Daltrey begins with what feels like political commentary. The chorus is this:

I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around me
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I’ll get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again
Don’t get fooled again
No, no!

And the song finishes with:

Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss

It seems a relevant commentary. The political wheel keeps spinning with different parties and different promises, but nothing really changes. What can you do? You smile, get on with your life, and hope that eventually the collective can see through the lies. It’s tough because they’re all telling lies – the leaders, the followers, the detractors, the strong, the weak, the rich, the disenfranchised, the majority, the minority, the activists, the conformers. You can’t sort through it all.  Just take care of your family. Hey, that’s what it sounds like to me.

There are two instrumental, solo-like sections during the eight and a half minutes. The first is mostly guitars and the second with all instruments but highlighting the keyboards. Daltrey’s patent scream doesn’t come until the end of the second one, at about the 7:45 mark.

We should all own this album and listen to it at least a few times a year.

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books

Assassination Vacation

This is yet another book I discovered via Nick Hornby and his fine book-about-books entitled Housekeeping vs. The Dirt. At the end of that post, back in March of 2006, I mentioned that I wanted to read Assassination Vacation. It’s amazing that a book I read five years ago is still influencing my reading life. It was brought to mind recently because I saw Sarah Vowell on Letterman and I thought she was hilarious. I finally complied with my proclamation from five years ago and bought Assassination Vacation for the Kindle.

This is part history book, part political commentary, and part travel book. Additionally, it’s all funny. Her writing is just as hilarious as the Letterman interview. Her humor is not for everyone, it’s often dark, negative, and sarcastic. She’s kind of like a mean Bill Bryson. I love it though, in fact, I think it’s brilliant.

Vowell, for some reason, is obsessed with presidential assassinations. She likes to visit assassination sites and view memorabilia from the horrific events. She’s especially excited if there’s a plaque commemorating something related to the assassination. Here is a passage illustrating the giddiness she often feels when she encounters an assassination-related site, in this case it’s a visit to the site of Mary Surratt’s boarding house:

Mary Surratt’s D.C. boardinghouse, where John Wilkes Booth gathered his co-conspirators to plot Lincoln’s death, is now a Chinese restaurant called Wok & Roll. I place an order for broccoli and bubble tea, then squint at an historic marker in front of the restaurant quoting Andrew Johnson that this was “the nest in which the egg was hatched.”

If you can’t tell, she’s especially excited by Abraham Lincoln, her favorite president. She’s a staunch defender of persecuted peoples and critical of our country’s treatment of Native Americans and African Americans, which could have something to do with why she reveres Lincoln so. She pulls no punches and you can feel her anger when she talks about those who have wronged others in the name of race, including family members. For example, she discusses the grandfather paradox while relating the story of the grandson of Dr. Mudd as he tries to clear his grandfather’s name, and then contrasts this to her feelings towards her great-great-grandfather:

What I like about the grandfather paradox is that it treats time travel not as some lofty exercise in cultural tourism – looking over Melville’s shoulder as he wrote Moby-Dick – but as a petty excuse to bicker with and gun down one’s own relatives. I just so happen to have a grandfather who deserved it, my great-great-grandfather, John Vowell. The reason why I would set the wayback machine for the sole purpose of rubbing him out is this: In the 1860s, the teenage John Vowell joined up with pro-slavery guerrilla warrior William Clarke Quantrill, who has been called the “most hated man in the Civil War,” which is saying something.

Sarah, you had me at “rubbing him out,” you wacky woman.

Mostly, this book is a hodgepodge of facts, figures, and commentary related to the first three presidential assassinations:

  1. Lincoln (April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth)
  2. Garfield (July 2, 1881, Charles J. Guiteau)
  3. McKinley (September 6, 1901, Leon Czolgosz)

She’s focused on these three, I think, because they’re linked by Lincoln’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln, who “was in close proximity” to all three assassinations. Robert Todd Lincoln gets a fair amount of space in this book as do a whole host of other characters. Vowell creatively brings in a bunch of tangential characters and weaves them into this milieu of political commentary and travelogue. Well done.

Yes, she has a political take that not all are going to agree with, especially Republicans and who think we’ve always been on the right track with our foreign policy. If you’re of this ilk, you may find Vowell full of hard edges. She wrote this book during the Iraq war and says:

When I told a friend I was writing about the McKinley administration, he turned up his nose and asked, “Why the hell would anyone want to read about that?” “Oh, I don’t know,” I answered. “Maybe because we seem to be reliving it?”

Even so, she shows her sentimental side often, like this passage about Garfield’s pessimism and his love for books:

As for me, coming across that downbeat commencement speech was the first time I really liked Garfield. It’s hard to have strong feelings about him. Before, I didn’t mind him, and of course I sympathized with his bum luck of a death. But I find his book addiction endearing, even a little titillating considering that he would sneak away from the house and the House to carry on a love affair with Jane Austen. In his diary he raves about an afternoon spent rearranging his library in a way that reminds me of the druggy glow you can hear in Lou Reed’s voice on “Heroin.”

Or she’ll speak lovingly of her nephew Owen, who accompanies her on many legs of the assassination vacation:

I have not been particularly shocked by how much I love Owen, but I am continually pleasantly surprised by how much I like him. He’s truly morbid. When he broke his collarbone by falling down some stairs he was playing on, an emergency room nurse tried to comfort him by giving him a cuddly stuffed lamb to play with. My sister, hoping to prompt a “thank you,” asked him, “What do you say, Owen?” He handed back the lamb, informing the nurse, “I like spooky stuff.”

I also liked the Chicago tie-ins; inevitable, you would think, because of Lincoln, but they’re a little more subtle than you would expect. For instance, she manages to throw in Daniel Burnham and Frank Lloyd Wright:

Secondly, with a building as iconic as the Lincoln Memorial, it’s such a given, seems so inevitable, I cannot imagine the Mall without it. Moreover, it’s so universally revered it’s hard to believe there were ever protests against the way it looked. But when Daniel Burnham, Cass Gilbert, Daniel Chester French, and their fellow commissioners chose Henry Bacon’s Greek temple design for the Lincoln Memorial in 1913, the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects, led by an associate of Frank Lloyd Wright’s, threw a fit.

I’ll mention it again, this was a nice combo of humor and history and a great book. It will enlighten and entertain, and run you through a series of differing emotions. What more could you ask of a good book?

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work

Book Review: Linchpin by Seth Godin

Seth Godin is primarily a marketing and management guy, so his books don’t often hit the list of books finance and accounting people should read. Which is a shame, because at times I felt like this book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?, spoke directly to the financial person in me.

Continue reading “Book Review: Linchpin by Seth Godin”
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music

Recovery – Eminem

Anger, in spades. If you want to get some of that anger out of your system, grab this. You’ve certainly heard Love the Way You Lie, his duet with Rihanna. There’s a lot of anger in that one. They did it at the Grammy’s this year and it was up for Record of the Year. The album also won Rap Album of the Year. This album is my first purchase using the Amazon Cloud Player. I had to try the Cloud Player and I’ve been batting around buying this album for awhile, so it was an opportune time to pull the trigger.

Give me twelve seconds for a quick digression. The Cloud Player is really cool. I may not purchase music on iTunes anymore. More in another post on this topic.

I don’t know where I stand on this album. For my taste, Eminem takes the explicitness to the extreme. I think he is much more explicit than Kanye West, as a point of comparison. If you just listen to the popular tunes like Not Afraid, Love the Way You Lie, and No Love, you might think Eminem has crafted an explicit album, but one with an acceptable level of profanity. But when you listen to the whole beast in unaltered form, every song is pretty gritty.

Hey, that’s cool. I’m an adult, I can handle it. I can appreciate some profanity when it adds to the anger. This album is about comebacks and second chances – about recovery. Those things take drastic measures at times.

You know what I think is cool about hip-hop? I love it when they incorporate music from completely different genres into their songs. Hip-hop artists do this frequently. More so than other genres I think.

There are a few awesome examples in this album. In the song Going Through Changes, Eminem includes a snippet from Changes by Black Sabbath. He gives writing credits to Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and Bill Ward. Both are songs about relationships. Clever, because the Black Sabbath version is about loss but it Eminem has used it in a song about recovery. Cool stuff. Find it Black Sabbath’s version here on You Tube. Listen to them both together. Great stuff.

Another example is No Love, which pays homage to What is Love by Haddaway. Go figure, but it’s a great tune and is probably the only song I own with lead vocals by Lil Wayne. In truth, I pronounce the double t when I say Lil Wayne, but that’s just me. I do think about the Roxbury Guys when I hear this song, but Eminem’s version is NSFW, so don’t pull it out at work.

Hip-hop is like a tour through pop culture.

It took me about a month to get to a long listening session with this album. After the long session, I appreciate it a lot. I can see throwing a few of the tracks into a play list related to recovery and rebirth. It won’t really hit a party mix for the Steffens and will probably be mostly confined to headphone listening. And after a bad experience last year trying to introduce my buddies to some new music, I won’t even try to suggest this to anyone I know. It’s good though. Worth the money, definitely.