The First Album I Ever Bought is an occasional guest post series where friends, family, and strangers talk about, well, the first album they ever bought. A new piece runs every Wednesday, and sometimes more often. If you’d like to submit, please see the guidelines here.

So here we are, guys and gals. It’s time for me to talk about the first record I ever owned: Kriss Kross’ Totally Krossed Out.

I was 9-years-old when Totally Krossed Out came out. Sorry, I was a very sheltered, pudgy, bespectacled 9-year-old who was prone to temper tantrums and was thoroughly obsessed with baseball when Totally Krossed Out came out. My family had only recently gotten cable, and I had only even more recently started to be permitted to watch MTV without my parents in my room. I first heard about Kriss Kross not from MTV but from my older neighbor Tim and, in a desperate attempt to be cool, I immediately put their album neatly on my Christmas list under the ‘tapes’ section without really knowing anything about them aside from the few bars of ‘Jump’ Tim ‘sang’/‘rapped’ for the few of us gathered to play football. I say all that as a way to admit the following: I had no business listening to Kriss Kross and I didn’t know a damn thing about anything they were rapping about.

And yet, there I was after getting the tape for Christmas, sitting in the back of the family van listening to songs about jumping (I was rather stout, so that wasn’t an activity I had a lot of experience with), missing the bus (I didn’t take the bus until high school), partying (no way dude- TGIF was on Friday nights and there was no way in hell I was missing that), being a ‘mac’ (Young Adam was not what one would call ‘good’ with the little ladies) and sagging pants (I was still in my ‘elastic waist required on all pants and shorts’ phase). Looking back, about the only thing I could have actually claimed to relate to was track 8, ‘Real Bad Dream,’ because I was a pro at having nightmares at that age.

Like most things you are obsessed with when you’re 9, the infatuation didn’t last long. I mean, with spring coming up I had baseball to start worrying about and couldn’t be bothered with things like stopping bum rushes. But man, for a few months Totally Krossed Out was my jam.

Adam Sharp writes about a great song every day at Songs For The Day.