they said this day would never come...

They said this day would never come, but on this November night, at this defining moment in history, through some strange performative act...ah, who am I kidding, I've wanted to be a music blogger since kindergarten.

On the Northeast Regional this afternoon, I read this sentence in Greil Marcus' Mystery Train (required for my music class) about Randy Newman's "Sail Away" (a song "in which," to quote Robert Christgau, "a slave trader becomes the first advertising man"):

Scary, astonishing, Newman has presented an American temptation -- tempting not only the Africans, who became Negroes, and went on to create the music that finally tossed up Elvis Presley, rock 'n' roll, Newman, and his audience, but tempting America to believe that this image of itself just might be true.

and recalled a recent comment by a certain hip-hop wunderkind, who HOLY CRAP also happens to be related to Joey and Dee Dee I KNEW HE WAS A PUNK ROCKER:

Then came Soulja Boy Tell Em [sic]. I asked him, “What historical figure do you most hate?” He was stumped. I said, "Others have said Hitler, bin Laden, the slave masters..." He said, "Oh wait! Hold up! Shout out to the slave masters! Without them we'd still be in Africa."

My jaw, at this point, was on the ground."We wouldn't be here," he continued, having no idea how far in it he'd stepped, "to get this ice and tattoos."

Clearly, SBT'E has been bumping Randy Newman lately, and Touré (some rock critic!) hasn't read Mystery Train. In the brief intervening time before the two musicians team up to teach short people how to crank dat (cranking dat Robocop is damn hard with little baby legs), I guess I'll have to watch this video to be reminded how riding a Segway is preferable to running around the jungle and scuffing up your feet:



Of course, there are also Adornian arguments to be made about slavish devotion to ice and tattoos or about the slavish element in ritualized dance crazes, but those arguments suck.