Changing the game for a sec...

... I don't want this enterprise to be entirely about Barack Obama and football. They generate plenty of heat all around the blogosphere and other dark corners of the Internet.

Now, of course, if that's what it takes to keep people to stay, we can talk about them all day long. But I'm a multidimensional brotha, you know?

There's plenty of time for all that other jazz later.

Speaking of jazz, I was listening to A Tribe Called Quest's final album, "The Love Movement," on the way to work this morning. You never know what you've got until it's gone is all I have to say.

I remember being about 13 years old, circa 1992, sitting the backseat of my cousin Mike's car with one of his young homies, Kwame from Chicago. Kwame popped a tape in the deck, and I was hooked for life.

Of course, I was already digging on KRS and Big Daddy Kane and, uh, M.C. Hammer at this point. But "The Low End Theory" was pure genius - Q-Tip and Phife trading smooth rhymes over some serious jazz samples was perfection to those untrained teenage ears.

I'm 30 now, and occasionally I let my standards slip - I was really feeling Yung Joc a couple years ago, and I can't stop myself from liking the simple-minded material from dudes like Rick Ross.

But it's good to know that, at some point, I figured out what good music was supposed to sound like. Sometimes you have to remind yourself that you have taste.