#earworms

I get it, Shaq. They're great. First of all, they're incredibly silly. Long before Wu-Tang Clan, they were doing this weird kung-fu movie schtick in their songs (which, admittedly, walks an uncomfortable line between "parodies of racist depictions of Chinese people in the movies" to "racist parodies of Chinese people in the style of those movies"). Their songs are jammed with pop culture references in a way that puts, say, Paul's Boutique to shame. You can get a sense of this by looking at the lyrics transcribed over at Genius (where they are criminally under-annotated):

https://genius.com/artists/Fu-schnickens

Take "La Schmoove," a song that references "The Jeffersons," "Leave It To Beaver," "Superfly," Honey-Nut Cheerios, Popeye, Elmer's Glue, Elmer Fudd, Pippi Longstockings, "Married With Children," "Three's Company," "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," "Do-Wah-Diddy," the board game Battleship, and Pepe Le Pew. It features rhymes like "we in there like swimwear," "Adios muchachos dorme vous unbuckle my Fu-Schnick shoe," and "Yo zilch kaput me nada none son." It's legit bonkers.

But also: they're really good. The frontman, Chip Fu (Roderick Roachford) raps really fast, has amazing flow, and periodically just starts rapping backwards, like literally saying the same syllables he just said, but backwards, with that same amazing flow. They are steeped in old dancehall, and it shines through (they more-or-less single-handedly revived Tenor Saw's now-familiar "Ring the Alarm").

Many of their songs feature a kind of hiphopified Phil Spector wall of sound, a kind of melodic drone that underlays the beats and lyrics. As soon as I hear that drone, I start smiling, because I know what's coming.

I have been earwormed by these tracks for this entire century and much of the past century. It's always really hard to explain why you like something, but I think that Fu-Schnickens' pop culture stream of consciousness and nonsense syllables are a kind of rhythmic version of my own internal monologue, which is a kind of endless babble of fragments of books, music, movies and TV; dumb jokes; words repeated until they lose all meaning and become meaningless phonemes, all kind of splinters of ideas and words floating around, bumping into each other.

There's lots of dancehall and dancehall-adjacent stuff that's arguably better than this album, like "The Good The Bad The Ugly & The Crazy," the amazing and underappreciated collaboration between Necka Demus, Junior Demus and Super Cat:

https://www.discogs.com/master/158493-Super-Cat-2-Junior-Cat-Junior-Demus-Nicodemus-The-GoodBadUgly-The-Crazy

And I could listen to Shaggy's cover of "Oh Carolina" all day:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtLqmWt2h2g

Or Apache Indian's "Boom Shack-A-Lak":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZzBd41NuZw

Or even better, "Ragamuffin Girl":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGhrpajNtKk

But none of music is on continuous shuffle-play in the back of my brain the way "F.U. Don't Take It Personal" is and has been since the Clinton administration:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2wD7FbIzGI&list=PLJw–ySHyZNwsmLcxfW3NWTyxQX7mARas

What's more, this is one of the very few (non-Talking Heads, non-David Byrne) albums that my daughter and I like listening to together in the car. It's so perfectly silly, virtuosic, funny, and danceable. Still as good as it was when I was young and had the hips I was born with. I've owned it on cassette and CD and as MP3s. I somehow own the vinyl (though I have no turntable).

I'm grateful to the management of this publication for the opportunity to share it with you.

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