LL Cool J, "Around the Way Girl"

“Around the Way Girl” is quartz-like, illuminating and reflecting tones so hopeful and desirous that I wish I had first heard it at a younger age. It would have been an invaluable school locker companion, adding teeth to an imaginary sideways smile or a heartbeat rhythm to recess foursquare. No other hip hop song can place me in such an immediate “good mood,” and so speedily; its bliss, begun by some cliffhanging percussion, feels fresh - each and every time.

What an encapsulation - of expectations and hope and naivety. Sure, LL’s on his most adult behavior, desiring a taste “like a cookie” and offering “a place to stay.” It all feels reaching, though. He’s grounded - and not by choice. She knows “what to say and do.” She spends her time “going to the movies” with a “homegirls crew.” She keeps her “switch” at the ready - and he distances himself accordingly. Past the bluster and playful boasting, he admits the most innocent, complex desire: a person with whom he can swap “private jokes.”

The song’s movement is itself a type of middle school dance - the kind my younger self would not dare attempt. Each chorus beaming a teenager’s radiant optimism, crafted with brittle plastic - “You got me shook up, shook down, shook out on your loving” - only to be sobered by a few cute mundanities, like “bamboo earrings” or “silk” and “denim” clothes. This is charming precision. There’s wonder in its simplicity. It’s a nice reminder of the things that should bring us all into its “good mood.”

Yet I hope we can sympathize with LL’s conclusion, his predicament. As it turns out, the song is about “Lisa, Angela, Pamela, Renee” - a neighborhood amalgam, of lust and twisted desire. It felt too perfect, I suppose, that infatuation could be so uncomplicated. Casting a daydream, living in a notebook’s margins, LL probably thought not of the work of it all. That, after all, comes later.

Perhaps middle schoolers understand things that we choose to forget.