Rate Your Music score: 2.34 out of 5!
"I'll be your cryin' shoulder..."
Everyone remembers "I Swear." This tender love ballad had hit versions by All-4-One and John Michael Montgomery. It also has a funny - if not childish - story. Back when the song was popular, there was a kid of elementary school age who lived upstairs from me above my old apartment. One of his specialties at the time was throwing perfectly good toy trucks in the air and hitting them with a baseball bat. Anyway, one day, he was in the back yard, and I overheard him loudly singing, "I swear...By the pee and the poo in the sky..."
Now there's some man out there who is going on 40 who probably has to disclose that on job applications. That is, if there were any jobs out there.
"I'll Be" has a similar story to "I Swear." Given radio's propensity for big ballads, it's surprising that a ballad that made the top 10 like "I'll Be" is so seldom heard now. This record by the man from Greenville, South Carolina, might be heard on a soft rock specialty station, but I rarely listen to those.
Now, "I'll Be" loomed large during the infamous Usenet war. At the time, there was a way to encode entire files to post on Usenet to be downloaded. On one of the newsgroups I read, somebody asked that someone post or send them an MP3 of "I'll Be."
This wasn't quite legal, of course. This was before YouTube, so Edwin McCain couldn't monetize this transaction. It's not as if the recording was out of print. Apparently, it even came out as a 45 RPM single, and that was as late as 1998. On the other hand, I still tried to buy 45's in 1998, but it was slim pickings by then.
After someone posted this request for an Edwin McCain bootleg, somebody responded with a truly enlightening reply.
Ready for it?
"I'll be the pee-pee that you poo-poo."
That was one of the most intelligent things posted on Usenet all year.
Usenet looks like a pillar of democracy compared to the heavily censored Internet of today, but it was actually taking rapid steps backward in the late '90s. Still, which would you rather have: newsgroups with occasional offhanded toilet references, or corporate-owned social media sites that collude to censor anyone who disagrees with their local unelected public health director or the ever-growing war machine?
