Steve Reynolds Program - Doowutchyalike
New year, new attitude!
“Hey Wampus, a facetious headline is deffo not a new attitude.”
Yeah, that’s right. Sorry.
But I DO like a new year. I like the arbitrary reset when the odometer flips. I like resolutions, even when they fall apart more often than not. It’s that vain hope if you change one little thing, other things will change like this was a mechanism that sets all these improvements in motion. It’s just finding that first thing to change and doing it. “That’s the tricky part,” I fool myself into believing.
My declared resolution this year is no beer. I don’t think this will be that much of a challenge, except on the hottest days of summer when an American lager so satisfactorily slakes. To be honest, I have drunk a lifetime of cans. Let’s see if cutting them out starts the Resolution Machine and gets me to the gym and becoming a professor or something.
Song #17
Doowutchyalike
by Digital Underground
I see guys and girls dancing
The late, great Shock G was to Digital Underground as George Clinton was to Parliament. He was the ringleader and the mainstay of a rotating crew of musicians, dancers and crew (including pre-everything Tupac who danced and performed as hypeman for the Underground before Shock G let him step to the mic on a few DU songs). And like Parliament-Funkadelic, a band DU sampled so heavily they named their second album Sons Of The P, DU let Shock G rap in the guise of different characters while also having loose science fiction storylines providing the framework for their albums.
It was as one of those aliases, Humpty Hump, that Shock G scored Digital Underground their humongous hit “The Humpty Dance.” The rare novelty rap song that holds up, it does that with a great sampled beat, and a commitment to the braggadociousnessest rhymes from a character whose big nose intrigues the ladies. It’s not really far from what other rappers did/do in earnest-- boasting about prowess, but coming from a guy laying on the nasal voice, and in Groucho Marx glasses with the mustache torn off, showed this whole performative part as the silly posturing humdrum rap can be. Plus, this couplet, “I get stupid, I shoot an arrow like Cupid / I'll use a word that don't mean nothin', like looptid” can still make me laugh, even just reading it.
Rewind a couple of months before that song was omnipresent on the radio, MTV and parties. A young me hears “Doowutchyalike” at the local Kinko’s being played by the guy behind the counter. Now, this is no rando employee. This is Jon Mooneyham, constant introducer of new music to me and my friends (also provider of xerox subsidies on flyers and zines). To this day, when I hear that sampled oooooh! on the one, I can hear it from Mooneyham’s boom box by his work table accompanied by the hum of the fluorescent bulbs overhead.
This may be the longest song on my list, complete with a fake outro and a fake computer voice that had to influence the interstitial tracks on A Tribe Called Quest’s Midnight Marauders. Shock G leads off with a verse, then changes his voice to do a verse in the guise of Humpty Hump. It’s almost as impressive as when he cribs a Rakim rhyme and following it with the confessorial line “sometimes I bite.”
Ultimately, it’s how the groove makes you want to dance that puts it on my list. That, and the mind of a 20 year old panicking about his life trajectory hearing someone saying do what you like, making it feel all right to slack for better or worse. The idea of a crew around a mic, goofin’ and crackin’ each other up, trying to outclever each other is what makes hip hop crews so appealing. They did what they liked.
So rest in peace, Shock G, you genius. You’re due a reassessment and a doc where DMC and Dave Grohl praise you in their talking head interviews.
End Matters
This week’s Song I’m Mad I Forgot To Put On The List is Top Billin’ by Audio Two. Another one hit wonder from the same time period as Song #17.
I just realized I should link to songs in the writeups. I’ll go back and do that for the previous sixteen songs. Sorry, I’m improvising this deal.