Saturday, June 04, 2011

Horny Pink

Yes, time for some MADNESS again, playing "Embarrasment". They first did this song in *1980* for their album Absolutely. Yeah, they've been around for a *long* time, but they still wail...

- Badtux the Music Penguin

1 comment:

  1. It's long surprised me how Brits have been so swept up with black musical styles like ska and Northern Soul, but I guess it's no odder than white Americans starting bands that played blues-based tunes, Hawaiians being into reggae (if you've been there, you'll know it's like the islands' native music style now.) And then there's hip-hop...

    Side note about hip-hop -- I had this patient on the psych ward last week, Canada-born but first-generation, of Southeast Asian heritage. He had been a fourth-year accounting student at a local university, doing well academically and socially, no psych history, no substance abuse problems except he smoked pot since age 18. Guy goes an a short ecstasy jag because a dealer sells him a bag of the shit for cheap. Drops 6 tabs one time, 8 the next, including snorting it. (I never knew you could snort that shit. I thought it only came in tabs, but there's powder, too.)

    It sends the kid into mania. After a week of bizarre behaviour on campus (nothing harmful to other people) he's picked up by the police because he's wandering around saying crazed stuff like how he's channeling the soul of Tupac. And he's rapping, rapping, rapping. He'll sit in his room furiously filling out page after double-sided page of semi-rhyming lyrics. (Scrawled in pencil, because we only let them have stubby short #2s like you used for taking standardized tests. No pens or anything long, because they could be used to stab staff.) Then he'll come to the nurses and want to show us the raps, to recite them, to talk about the feelings behind them, all in this pressured voice, like there's a force inside impelling him to jet out the verbiage. (Which there is, but it's the frantically firing neurons which are the genesis of his mania.)

    It's crappy rap, too. No flow, stilted imagery -- he name-checked Oscar Wilde in one rap. Thumbs up for educated literary references, but how in the hell does a gay English poet have anything to do with the hip-hop milieu? "Milieu" is not a hip-hop word either, but I don't write rap. The kids family and the shrinks are hoping his hip-hop urges go away as the mania burns out. I hope the kid doesn't wind up convinced he needs to take "mood stabilizer" meds for the rest of his life for what might be a one-off brain-warp caused by street drugs that had who-knows-what weird bent molecules in them through some flawed cooking process.

    Anyway, my point is that hip-hop can be a form of insanity. Another reason not to like the shit.

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