[Editor's note: This post originally appeared on Feb. 23, 2008, while we were still getting Stranger Dance off the ground and we got about four visitors per day – us. Seeing as how posting over the holidays gets slow, but people's thirst for music doesn't, we've decided to re-post some of our favorite posts from the past year that folks may not have seen.]

It always bugs me out when I’m talking about music to someone younger – especially a music lover – and I ask if they like a band from 10-15 years ago and, in return, get a blank stare: “I’ve never heard of them.” It’s weird, especially since I grew up in an era where I grew up on my parent’s music (’60s and early ’70s rock), was weened off of that (’80s pop radio – but only for a year or two), then branched off on my own (thank you Run D.M.C.). Apparently the time-lined introduction to music doesn’t happen anymore.

So, before I digress too much more and end up yelling at those young punks to get off my lawn, I’ll get to the point: I love rap. I have since lo, that fateful day in 1985, when I heard Run D.M.C.’s “King of Rock” and had my first “Holy shit!” moment with music that didn’t involve Michael Jackson’s Thriller. I’ve loved it ever since, in all it’s twist, turns and incarnations. Old-school, basic shit? Yes. Pop rap? Sure. “Summertime” was a great song and fuck you if you’re too cool to recognize it. Black militant rap? Let me dig out my red, yellow and green Africa pendent. Gangsta rap? The fuck you looking at, bitch? Point is, unless it’s total bullshit, I can handle it.

My question, though, is when was the golden era of rap? Join me, won’t you, after the jump and we can discuss.

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I mentioned before that bad presidents inspire good music. Ronald Reagan was a springboard for a whole generation of punk bands like The Dead Kennedys, Reagan Youth and MDC, among others, while also laying the groundwork for the first wave of political rap groups like Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions.

Inspired by our election night collection, I decided to put together some songs inspired by the disaster that we sane Americans like to call the George W. Bush administration. We may have gotten an endless war, a collapsed economy, international loathing and eight years of general malaise out the deal, but also got some good music. Here’s a small collection of songs inspired by Shrub, and this is by no means comprehensive – if you have a cool song to add, let me know in the comments.

Only 72 days left.

MP3s:

So, it’s Saturday and the top post on Stranger Dance has the word “Wednesday” displayed prominently in the headline. Somebody’s slippin’! (That would be we four.) So look, here’s another post with a time-bound headline, so when you sign on Monday and see this still sitting at the top, you’ll really know what kind of lazy assholes we all are. … Busy. Busy assholes.

Anyway, there was a few interesting things that crossed the music wires this week, the biggest of which being the addition of Jimi Hendrix to Guitar Hero. I don’t know much about that game, beside it being Activision’s evil attempt to take over the world … which I’m fine with. Somebody’s gotta take control of this staggering flame-out we live on. My frame of reference for Guitar Hero pretty much consists of a terrific episode of South Park, so I don’t know how the thing works, but I really hope that when one is playing Jimi Hendrix the game is impossibly hard. Like, people-won’t-play-it-because-it’s-so-hard hard, because Jimi Hendrix was, well, really good and you, I (especially I) or Jack White couldn’t play a third of the Hendrix catalogue.

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[Editor's note: We'd like to welcome Uncle Corey to our band of brothers here at the Stranger Dance. Besides being a certifiable life-long music lover and all-around brown-bear-cub-like nice guy, he also spent the better part of his 20s working for a host of newspapers across Washington and California, so he'll hopefully bring some kind of journalistic credibility to what we do here.]

It always bugs me out when I’m talking about music to someone younger – especially a music lover – and I ask if they like a band from 10-15 years ago and, in return, get a blank stare: “I’ve never heard of them.” It’s weird, especially since I grew up in an era where I grew up on my parent’s music (’60s and early ’70s rock), was weened off of that (’80s pop radio – but only for a year or two), then branched off on my own (thank you Run D.M.C.). Apparently the time-lined introduction to music doesn’t happen anymore.

So, before I digress too much more and end up yelling at those young punks to get off my lawn, I’ll get to the point. I love rap (or hip-hop, whatever your Hipster Dialect-o-Tron 3000 requires you say), I have since lo, that fateful day in 1985, when I heard Run D.M.C.’s “King of Rock” and had my first “Holy shit!” moment with music that didn’t involve Michael Jackson’s Thriller. I’ve loved it ever since, in all it’s twist, turns and incarnations. Old-school, basic shit? Fuck, and yeah. Pop rap? “Summertime” was a great song and fuck you if you’re too cool to recognize it. Black militant rap? Let me dig out my red, yellow and green Africa pendent. Gangsta rap? The fuck you looking at, bitch? Point is, unless it’s total bullshit, I can handle it.

My question, though, is when was the golden era of rap? Join me, won’t you, after the jump and we can discuss.

Click here to read more