1991 was a great year for me. I was 11 years old and was in the 5th grade just living life to the fullest. My free time was spent playing sports (soccer, basketball and baseball), watching professional sports anytime I could, eating candy not caring one bit about the deterioration of my teeth and listening to a lot of rap music in my fresh Sony Walkman. I was watching a lot of good TV shows too. Saved By the Bell and Rap City on weekday afternoons after school and The Fresh Prince of Bell Air and Seinfeld once per week during prime time TV. On the weekends I had Yo MTV Raps!, The Simpsons, Married with Children, and In Living Color to keep me entertained on the couch. This was my heyday in TV watching and the shows available were fire. To take a break from my favorite sitcoms I had professional sports on TV and the single most important highlight I remember from 1991 comes from the NBA dunk contest where Dee Brown from the Boston Celtics had an innovative no look dunk that had never been seen before. This became something I perfected nightly on my Nerf Mini Hoop in my room.
Outside of real sports, professional wrestling was MAJOR in ‘91. Hulk Hogan, Macho Man Randy Savage, Mr. Perfect, The Million Dollar Man Ted Dibiase, Jake “The Snake” Roberts, Koko B. Ware, Mr. Perfect, The Undertaker, The Rockers, The Legion of Doom. Damn…. DEEEEEEP roster right there. 1991 also marked the arrival of the great Nature Boy Ric Flair making his debut in the WWF from WCW. This was a big deal because outside of maybe Sting, Ric Flair was the greatest pro wrestler that hadn’t yet made his way to the WWF. And let’s not forget that The Ultimate Warrior was roided out and sprinting to the ring and shaking the ropes like a madman for each match and bringing an insane amount of energy (and poor technical wrestling) to the squared circle each week. I was a HUGE wrestling fan and my brother and I would watch the shows and then try to recreate all of our favorite moves and stage actual matches in his room. When we weren’t doing that we were playing with all of our wrestling action figures. We loved it!
In elementary school I had formed my posse and we were all very close. We went to school together and played youth sports against each other so we spent a lot of time becoming tight friends. We played a lot of outdoor hoops, always had our BMX bikes nearby (my Dyno VFR was fire) to thrash the backstreets of our hood and you might even catch us waxing up a local street curb so that we could try to grind the curb on our skaters to emulate the fresh skaters we saw doing tricks way more complicated than this. We stayed active and therefore stayed out of trouble most of the time.
The Blind video detonated like an atomic bomb in 1991, altering the course of skating forever. Here's the most influential skater of all time, Mark Gonzales in the best part from an epic video.
During the school year, Wednesdays meant half days for us elementary school students. So when that final bell rang in class around lunchtime it was a mad dash to the bike racks. This is where we chopped it up before and after school but Wednesdays we were out of there with the quickness. And we would be racing each other on the short ride to our favorite hangout. No this wasn’t The Max or even The Peach Pit but it might as well have been. Round Table Pizza was always home base for us as kids in sunny Southern California. We went there every week for Wednesday half days, for every Little League year-end team celebration, for every Soccer team party, a lot of birthday parties growing up, and my parents loved the RTP pizza too so we got to eat our favorite pizza all the time. Til this day, our OG crew remains loyal to RTP because of the good pizza and the nostalgia from childhood.
On our Wednesday half days, it was important to get to Round Table before the other kids so you could get your pepperoni personal pizza and fountain drink order in. From there you were straight to the coin machine with a fresh dollar bill to get your quarters for the mini arcade. Or if you were a G, you would have those quarters pre-loaded in your pockets so you could skip the coin machine and get the first game. And in 1991 you wanted to get to the arcade quickly because they had a video game that everybody wanted to play. There was never hype around an arcade game like this and I was all in. I was obsessed over that damn game. Looking back I think you could classify me as an addict. I needed quarters to feed my addiction. In February of 1991, Street Fighter 2 came out and took arcades by storm.
Allyoucan after allyoucan. PERFECT
I was a fiend for Street Fighter 2. And I’m not saying that lightly. I needed my damn quarters and when they were gone I was on my hands and knees looking all around the coin drop and floor for an extra quarter or two so I could play more games. My mom would usually give me an extra dollar on Wednesdays for quarters but that was nowhere near enough to feed the addict. I had to devise a way to get more quarters. I NEEDED to play more Street Fighter 2. I don’t remember how I came up with my plan to do this but looking back it was absolutely brilliant for an 11 year old kid. If my mom gave me a dollar per week, that broke down evenly to 4 shiny quarters that could be used to play 4 games of SF2. But………. I had an idea…. I took that dollar and instead broke it down to all nickels. 20 nickels rattling around in my sweatpants pockets as I rode my Dyno VFR through the streets hitting quick bunny hops or a quick wheelie whenever I could to keep my BMX moves on point.
That Dyno VFR life y’all!
Once home, my parents weren’t around and my babysitter was watching soaps upstairs so I went to the garage and went right to his immaculate workbench where if you moved anything just an inch he would know. From there, I carefully grabbed his trusty hammer and went to the concrete in our side yard with my 20 nickels and my master plan. Once down on the ground, I proceeded to beat the sh*t out of every single one of those nickels with my dad’s hammer. Why you ask? Well… I thought that if I could pound each nickel and flatten them out to the exact size and thickness of a quarter I could turn each one of those deformed nickels into Street Fighter 2 games at Round Table. And you know what? It totally worked! I suddenly because video game rich at Round Table and was able hone my Street Fighter skills the summer of ‘91 with game after game after game. I was easily a top player in the hood (shout out to Aldryn, Dash, Corey, Mason and Marshall) and was making my way up the ranks fast. I even became a local Round Table legend for knocking out 7 consecutive touch of deaths with Guile on the bonus stage which was unheard of. The Touch of Death was a glitch in the game when you played with Guile where he could throw you without touching you. It was nowhere close to as easy as a Axe kick or a Sonic Boom which even beginner SF2 gamers could pull off.
My Street Fighter 2 run at Round Table came crumbling down on one summer weekday morning in 1991. I took my usual ziplock baggie of pounded nickels and hit my video game dojo. The problem was that on this day I had a nickel get lodged in the coin slot. Usually a quick punch to the coin slot would push the jammed coin in but that day it was truly stuck. So as an 11 year old, I did the most logical thing I could think of. I jumped kick that damn coin slot like a young Jean Claude Van Damme from Bloodsport!
While I was karate kicking my treasured Street Fighter 2 arcade game, the manager of the pizza joint had his eye on me and not only saw my sick jump kick but also probably heard the loud thump from back. Ralph the Rat (that’s what we knew him as) sprinted towards me and for a hot second completely forgot that I was a scrawny little 11 year old kid. He screamed at me right in front of my face and was sooooo heated! He was very close to hitting me but I think he quickly realized that I was just a young dumb kid. He then proceeded to do something that I never heard of. On that summer day in 1991, Ralph the Rat BANNED ME FOR LIFE FROM ROUND TABLE PIZZA. As an 11 year old who loved RTP this was a big deal. I bailed RTP and took it in stride laughing hysterically and what all just happened. I hopped on my fresh Dyno VFR and knew that I couldn’t go back to Round Table for a long time but it didn’t matter because I had a memory from 1991 that will live with me for my whole life. The nearby Liquor Store got Street Fighter 2 Turbo not long after and Ralp the Rat got fired a couple of months after my Van Damme jump kick so life quickly went back to normal. Phew!
Below were 10 of my favorite rap songs and videos from my official rap soundtrack for 1991. 1991 brought us an amazing year in rap and hip hop music. The West Coast, East Coast, and South were all dropping bangers that still knock today. You had gangster rap coming into its own and jazz rap boom bap hip hop starting to bubble. A great year to be a rap fan! Hit the Spotify link down at the bottom of the blog for more of my favorite rap and hip hop tunes from 1991. One of the best years in rap history!
DJ Quik “Born and Raised in Compton”