![]() I was at the women’s college whose students had once vanquished tip-drilling Nelly from campus during his own bone marrow drive! The problem was that, though the songs were about nothing more than women and clubbing and money, they were catchy. ![]() My mother lamented that my generation would have no true music to look back upon, as if George Clinton weren’t famous for singing about a flashlight.īut even amongst ourselves, debate raged-were these songs dumb? There were so many of them-“Snap Yo Fingers,” “Wait (The Whisper Song),” “Knuck if You Buck,” “Oh I Think They Like Me,” and, as I recall, both “Ho Sit Down” and “Do Your Dance on That Ho.” They certainly were misogynistic. My roommate, who didn’t say it but really wanted me to know she was blacker than me, insisted that the dance we had all started doing-a three-beat shuffle, a ti-ti-ta, ti-ti-ta-was not called the Laffy Taffy, just set to a song by the same name. ![]() It sounded like it had been made on a Casio keyboard, two index fingers jabbing out a two-note beat. All through my teenage years I had been trapped in cycles of Wilco and Modest Mouse, Parliament and Oscar Peterson I was not prepared for Atlanta at the dawn of snap music.ĭ4L’s “Shake Dat Laffy Taffy” was the first of those songs I remember. I was almost afraid to speak, for fear of what new ignorance I might reveal. You’re from Maine? people kept saying, underlined and italicized. On the first day of college, I asked a black man from Brooklyn to Harlem Shake for me. It’s incredible to think of what I didn’t know then.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |