Arrested Development Coming To Chicago In 0 Years, 0 Months & 6 Days
By Tankboy in Arts & Entertainment on Oct 9, 2012 4:40PM
We realize many of our readers are too young to understand just how big a deal Arrested Development was back in the day. Twenty years ago the group's debut 3 Years, 5 Months & 2 Days in the Life Of... was a commercial monster, eventually going over four times Platinum according to the RIAA. In the early '90s it was one of those CDs that somehow found its way into just about everyone's CD collection, no matter what their musical tastes might have been.
So what was it that fueled their success? At a time when hip-hop was truly beginning to blow up in the mainstream, Arrested Development delivered an incredibly pop-friendly, positive disc that was easy for folks to latch onto. Tracks like "Mr. Wendel," and "People Everyday" both took easy to place samples from Sly and the Family Stone, showing the group's musical roots didn't really span all that widely, but that only made them that much more accessible. And their monster hit "Tennessee," took a Prince lick and lyric and turned it into something even college frat boys could get down to.
We know in retrospect none of this sounds particularly groundbreaking, but when you take it in the context of this dropping in the midst of the dual rise of grunge and gangster rap, Arrested Development's sunny hip-hop backed by the group's positive, community minded lyrics, you can see just why 3 Years, 5 Months & 2 Days in the Life Of... caught so many ears. In succeeding years the band grew somewhat cartoonish is people's eyes as public memory began to whittle them down to a pack of one-hit wonder backpack hip-hoppers, and considering how seriously the band began to take themselves, eventually resulting in the hugely disappointing sophomore effort Zingalamaduni, we can understand that.
We admit that when we heard the band was mounting a tour, stopping at Double Door on October 15, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of their debut we instinctively snickered too. But then we went back and listened to that album again, for the first time in probably fifteen years, and discovered it actually holds up remarkably well. Despite it's simplicity and obvious sampling, the music actually still sounds fresh, and the lyrics aren't the sharpest rhymes of all time but we their positivity is actually still striking. With so much time having passed, our ears can finally approach the music in much the way they probably did when they heard this album twenty years ago, and we can again understand why it did hit such a cultural nerve that it catapulted into everyone's homes. And now we no longer feel as silly for still owning our copy of 3 Years, 5 Months & 2 Days in the Life Of.... In fact we may give it a spin a little more regularly again.
Arrested Development plays October 15 at Double Door, 1572 N Milwaukee, 9 p.m., $15-$20, 21+