My Night With Tone Loc

By many measures, the town of Troy, Oregon, is quite remote. There is no cell phone reception, any call that you make on a landline automatically counts as long-distance, and the nearest grocery store is an hour-and-a-half drive away through three states. But when I moved here to work on a cattle ranch run by my friends Cory and Dave, I think the major concern I heard from my buddies in San Francisco was something along the lines of "What are you gonna do there for fun?" We all wondered what it would be like to not have any movie theaters, dance clubs, or bars to fill up an evening.

So that's why I was shocked, intrigued, bemused, and most of all, pumped, when Dave came up to me last week and said, "Get ready, Tone Loc is coming to town." "Town", in this case, meant Lewiston, Idaho, 90 minutes over the mountains from us. But since all I knew of Idaho was its fame for potatoes and white supremacists, Lewiston seemed like the perfectly ironic enough place for some old skool rap revival.

Tone Loc, for those of you who don't know who he is (and, if you don't know, you weren't a teenager in 1989), was the purveyor of exactly two classic hip-hop hits--"Wild Thing" and "Funky Cold Medina", the latter a prescient satire of every chest-thumping gangsta tale of sexual conquest that came to populate 90s rap. "Funky Cold Medina" is an "afrodisiac" drink that Mr. Loc hopes will help him "git with the ladies", but instead leads to: 1) his dog humping his leg, 2) a contestant from the Love Connection wanting to marry him after the first date, and 3) him taking a lady named Sheena back to his "crib" only to get a little "surprise". Let us take this opportunity to all get a little Loc'ed out:

I went up to this girl, she said "Hi, my name is Sheena"
I thought she'd be good to go with a little funky cold medina
she said "I'd like a drink", I said "ok, I'll go get it"
and then a couple of sips, she cold licked her lips and I knew that she was with it
so I took her to my crib and everything went well as planned
but when she got undressed it was a big old mess
Sheena was a man
so I threw him out
I don't fool around with no Oscar Meyer weiner
you must be sure that the girl is pure for the funky cold medina

Notice how the last two lines subtly evoke those halcyon days of the late 1980s. Not only does Loc reference the cultural and culinary touchstone of the "Oscar Meyer weiner", but then he takes us back to our shared memories of those "pure" innocent days when we were 13, just coming into our hormones, and all we wished for in a girl was that she not have a penis. Sigh.

Despite the man's obvious genius, I have to admit that I was a little concerned that Tone Loc was coming to Lewiston. Had he really fallen so far that he had to leave the "Left Coast" to come up to Idaho in the middle of the winter to play a 250-person capacity bar named Boomer's? Was he still reeling from his stunning loss during the 1989 Grammy Awards in the Best New Artist category to Milli Vanilli? (Before you mock, Rob and Fab beat the Indigo Girls that year too). Was this all a baldfaced ploy by an ageing rapper for a little more "loot"? Or maybe, just maybe, was this visit an affirmation that our new millenium has finally brought us a colorblind society where white people everywhere can nod their heads, throw their hands in the air, form a W with their fingers and scream "This is def! Also, it is fly!" with a complete lack of self-consciousness?

Friends, I am here to report that my Friday night with Loc took me to a fully irony-free zone, where the whitest people I've ever seen in my life mixed freely with the natives from the local Nez-Perce reservation and wondered aloud to themselves which of the four black guys mingling through the bar was Tone Loc. Where dudes with ZZ top beards guilelessly celebrated whenever Loc and his two forty year-old backup MCs substituted "Lewiston" for "Compton" in their songs. Where hoochy-dressed middle-aged women desperately leaned open-mouthed toward the front as Tone poured from a bottle of the "Funky Cold Medina." And where Dave, cowboy through and through, the man who I married last year, took his shot, jumped on the stage, took the mic from Tone Loc, and freestyled until getting booed off the stage.

The night gave me hope. Hope that a boy from Jersey can join with cowboys and indians in Idaho and, for a forty-minute set, sing, sing, sing, tongue-nowhere- near-cheek, in brotherhood with one of the godfathers of rap. Hope that here on the ranch I can lose all of the cynicism of the city and party whenever I want like it's 1989. And hope that the next two months out here will somehow measure up to the Friday night I spent in Lewiston with Mr. Tone Loc.