1st of Tha Month - Bone Thugs-N-Harmony

Wake up, wake up, wake up
it's the first of the month 
So cash your checks and come up

If you've never been to Cleveland, Ohio... I don't blame you.

I once heard Cleveland described as a good place to be from. Not a place you want to be going back to. But Bone Thugs-N-Harmony are from Cleveland and they know how to pop the new month off right. At least Cleveland has that going for 'em!

Yeah, this song is about drugs. Oh no! How scary! Perhaps I should share a commercial where, say, a bunch of rich white people chug champagne in a high-rise... or maybe one with a folksy fella slamming Natty Lights on a tractor in a wheat field. I mean, now THAT is real life, right? That is an acceptable way to consume entertainment - no drugs, just alcohol!

If you don't know, T.H.U.G.S., in the language of the Bone, stands for Trues Humbly United Gathering Souls. I was drawn to Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. They are from my home state, so there's always that bit of kinship you feel for anyone who rises up out of the muck and mire you yourself are trying to escape but it was more than that. Cleveland was a long way from me, but I knew what the streets were like, to a lesser degree. I saw the drug trade with my own eyes, passed along baggies at parties like we were stacking sandbags on a levee. I knew that life. I know The Hustle. And I know for a fact that if I lived on E. 1999 St. and the city put up a sign dedicated to Bone Thugs, yeah, my dudes and I woulda snatched that up immediately. I guarantee that bitch was gone by midnight. Props to the Trues who saw that opportunity and hustled.

Come, come with-a ease, I gotta blaze up my spliff / Get live with the Bone Thugs, Poetic Hustlaz and the Graveyard Shift / on the first