Mother’s Day and Ghetto Booty
I was very bad this weekend and I didn’t do any of the 1,435 things on my To Do list, which had been on the previous week’s To Do, then got put off to this past week’s To Do, and then got squished into the weekend, and then I got headache-y, so please boo me now. Bad girl. Baaaad girl. So now I must hop skip double time.
So for you, I give you some belated Mothers’ Day videos:
in case you also like Joe Geronimo:
and, more importantly, in case you live under a rock:
Which reminds me that I must interject and laud the boys who write these songs for a moment, because I have giddily listened to this one approximately five different times this weekend (should I be embarrassed about that?) and it’s been stuck in my head the rest of the time. What’s so exciting about really nastily-facial-haired guys sleeping with their friends’ mothers, you ask? To answer that, I must take us back a moment.
When I was around the middle school age, I listened to the rock station. My love for Tool was burgeoning and my tastes were skewed enough that I didn’t consider it hard rock until it was the kind of “music” that had no melody line and where no lyrics are written because the whole song is screamed. At this time, when every little thing still has the potential to embarrass, I had a love for hip hop as well, and I had to keep it under wraps. ‘Cuz I was a rock girl.
Then I got to be a few years older and I didn’t have to hide it anymore, I just liked hip hop. And these days hip hop is one of my favorite kinds of music. But even now, I generally stress that I like conscious hip hop. I like music with an intelligent (or at least intelligible) thing to say. And I like hip hop with talent. I love the Roots, old Common Sense, Talib Kweli, Zion I, Kanye, and loads more.
I’m old enough now that I don’t really get embarrassed so much anymore by silly things like taste in music, but I’ll admit, I still don’t heavily advertise this: where I don’t generally like talent-less top 40 pop music, I secretly LOVE talentless top 40 hip hop hits. I love bass that threatens to reprogram your heartbeat. And I also love old-school hip hop.
I just love to ghetto booty shake.
There. I said it.
In and of itself this is not a problem. The problem lies in the fact that I am a hippie nerd girl. I don’t advocate buying 24 karat gold grills that are not replacements for real teeth, but are just a “fashionable” sheath for them. I don’t advocate derisive talk about women or assuming that paying them to shake their ass two inches from an HD video camera is all the plot a music video needs. I don’t advocate buying $8,000 reverse spinning rims for your blindingly shiny and hazmat orange HumV.
These are things that are not in line with my values. And yet confound it all if I don’t start to shake my own ass when your music comes on. It’s a cruel, cruel plight. Woe is me. I am hopelessly in love with a world in which I do not belong.
Sure, there are plenty of places to dance that are filled with people like me. But they generally play funk or something comparable. And funk is fun. Sure. I can do that. But it’s no ghetto booty shake.
There are places where I could probably find a club that is my style. But where I live currently, the ghetto booty options are either:
- Really skeezy and dimly lit with cheap drinks, sticky mustaches, and breasts struggling to escape their tube top confines.
- Swanky and modern with the young professional crowd in mind and lines maintained for publicity out front even when it’s 40 degrees and the club is empty inside.
or
In either case, whoever my dance buddy is and I just find ourselves carving out a section of the dance floor and going at it. And in either case, can you imagine how ridiculously out of place I look?
I mean, you’re talking to the girl who wants to start a club that you’re supposed to wear pajamas to (no, not lingerie) so you’re comfortable and don’t have to worry about dress code. You’re talking to the girl who wishes they’d open an early bird special club so I could get on my booty shake AND get some sleep.
Speaking of which, was this supposed to be a joke? Is this supposed to be a bad idea?
Anyway, so that’s the background on my plight. And then here come these totally nerdy white Jew boys (I get to say that because I’m both white and a Jew) who are musical GENIUSES and they make music in the ghetto booty style but with silly lyrics that make fun of the values that make us squirmy so that we can love it guilt free.
It’s possibly the best thing to happen since sliced bread.
It just eliminates that awkward part of a night out on the town where I suddenly have an out of body experience and look down on myself thinking:
Really? Are you really earnestly giving your all to a self-ass slap because the song told you to? Seriously?
