Et Tu, Flavor Flav?
Public Enemy. To me, they’ve always represented what’s good and right about rap music; from the message to the musicianship, Public Enemy has always been the standard.
This brings me to the subject of Flavor Flav; the side-man and "court jester" of sorts to Public Enemy’s massive personality on the mic, Chuck D. In my mind, Flav’s goofball antics (some of which really defined rap style; if "Yeah boyeeeee" could be copywritten, Flav would have cashed a lot more checks) always had an air of irony to them… he was less like a clown and more like Batman’s Joker; you wanna laugh, but you don’t. Or you do laugh, but you don’t want to. Either way, he was part of what made Public Enemy great. He was part of the sound, part of the message of social rebuilding and big part of the energy, diffusing Chuck D’s too-serious-to-swallow-without-a-chaser aura.
This morning I dialed up Yahoo and saw this: a new reality TV show entitled “The Flavor Of Love”. Oh, sweet merciful God, no. Flavor Flav has been made into the axis of a reality TV show geared to find him a mate. Could anything possibly be more odious? "Yeah boyeeeee" has now been reduced to a modern-day "Whatchyoo talkin’ about, Willis?" as this aging rap icon works overtime to line the pockets of VH1’s corporate moguls, essentially pouring a bucket of white-out on PE’s anti-corporation cornerstones like "Shut It Down". Between commercials for Diet Coke and Lexus, Flav will shed his counter-culture, rap-without-fear-or-compromise legacy and dance around his mansion and pool with half-naked hootchies under the guise of finding "True Love". He’s now a walking, talking version of Fear Factor except, in this case, Flav himself is the object of horror, and won’t it be wacky to see how the ladies react to it?
There’s a darker side to the joke; Flav is a convicted spouse-abuser. Though I love Public Enemy, I will never condone that… and I find the effort to make a big, carefrree party out of finding Flav a girlfriend tasteless given this ugly stain on his history.
So thanks, VH1, for playing a part in my gradual but oh-so-steady dissolving of faith that there’s something in rap music which counters the product-placement deluge of nobodies like Fifty Cent (who’s keepin’ it so real he has 17 product mentions in seven songs). Thank you for boiling rap down to being nothing more than just another commodity. More than anything else… thank you, Flavor Flav, for showing the world that (as many suspected) Chuck was the one with the backbone to stand up to corporate America.
Also, I’d like to say that I don’t think "macadocious" is a word. I intend to write to Yahoo about it.
December 31st, 2005 at 8:41 pm
If I had a mansion with half naked hootchies all over the place, I would let nobody in
December 31st, 2005 at 9:40 pm
Gotta go with Jim here, the cameras and all non-hootchies would be evicted, and quickly too.
December 31st, 2005 at 10:45 pm
I don’t know you, John, but I think Jim is the last person on the face of the earth who would ever be mistaken as a member of Public Enemy.
January 1st, 2006 at 12:31 am
You can include John in there with me
January 1st, 2006 at 4:23 pm
Me? I’m just doubting that Jim will ever need to worry about evicting the camera from his half-naked hootchie-filled mansion.
I’m just saying.
:-)
January 2nd, 2006 at 12:16 am
Columbia Records back in the early 70s ran an ad campaign that featured a circle of young folks—various races, genders and social persuasions—passing around a burning controlled substance. The headline was, “The man can’t bust our music.”As true today as it was then.
P.S. There are no half-naked hoochies in Nova Scotia at this time. Fully naked mooses, yes, but no HNH.
January 2nd, 2006 at 5:40 am
If I had a mansion, there would be HNH everywhere!!
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