Yes, I love this song, and here's "Why?"

It's feeling like some sort of Doomsday Project out here. Turn on the tube, and you're met with stories of parents successfully plotting to kill their children; shut the TV off in disgust, pick up a newspaper or sign on to any random news-y website, and something to the effect of "Company Doe, Inc. has just laid off 8,000 employees" greets your eyes within nano-seconds. Flip on the radio, hoping for some audible salvation, and you hear Lil Wayne's spacey ass attempting to make "rock music," causing eardrums to ooze out that inner red liquid that you nearly lost all of a month or so back when Kanye West covered up his terrible singing abilities by Auto-tuning his voice to sound "provocative," yet coming off more "intolerable" than "incredible."

Throw us a bone here. Something, please give already.

In times like these, I'm actually quite proud of myself for being able to maintain a calm sense of "just gotta ride it out and enjoy the things I do have." Such as a job (knock on stable wood, of course, just like everybody else in America), big creative dreams, a healthy loving family, great friends, and a massive DVD collection that'll continue to increase thanks to my insatiable appetite for cinema. Plus, this Monday night officially begins my journey into screenwriting, slowly but surely turning my only-have-been-talked-about dreams into a working-on-it-actively-now reality. Tons of stories bouncing around and grappling within my head, now given somewhere to grow.

All good things, indeed. But you know what my secret weapon for inner tranquility is, though? It's one of many, but the one I want to divulge at this given moment. Guilty pleasure central. Shameless indulgence in crappy product, no question. Here goes....the enjoyment of Harlem World's melted-mozzarella-on-a-provolone-spread jam "I Really Like It."


A video that defies "good idea" conceptualism.

Remember this one? Back in 1999 (ha! it's the 10th anniversary, come to think of it), jolly-old Mase launched his offshoot side group of neighborhood friends and sibling Baby Stace (Yup, that was really her rapping name.....what could be an even worse artistic tag? How about her groupmate's: Blinky Blink? Case shut.). Their album, cleverly-titled The Movement, pretty much sucked, released on So So Def and cluttered with they-wish-they-were-even-near-mediocre rappers and a mish-mosh of soft production and the occasional "hard street" beat. Forgettable, floppage. Totally.

"I Really Like It," though, is just sublime, if you ask me. A song so blatantly cheesy packaged in a video that is pure "ether" to an artist's credibility, "I Really Like It" is the kind of sarcastic-gem that VH1's old Awesomely Bad countdowns were designed for. A lowest-common-denominator spin on then-known-as-Puff Daddy's tried and true sampling bend, perpetrated by one of Puff's very own.

Still, the irony remains---Even the worst of musical sludge can sometimes raise a spirit or two. And "I Really Like It," no matter what time of day or mood I'm in, is a song that puts me in a happy place. It's just so downright perky, that it's undeniably a picker-upper. And when everything around you seems to be in dire straits, why not bask your ears in something that's end-to-end cheerful? Even if it's truly a shit sandwich on wax.