You might get cancelled if you say Rhythm Is A Dancer [July 19, 1992]

Plus: Madonna, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, and Ministry

Greetings, Time Travellers! 👋 Welcome back to the week of July 19, 1992.

📰 In the news this week: Large-scale rioting breaks out across Northern England, with violent clashes with police in Bradford, Blackpool and Huddersfield. Some protestors shout anti-police slogans in support of the L.A. riots from earlier in the year.

📽️In the cinema, audiences find out first-hand that you a movie doesn’t need much more than Charles Grodin and an absolutely massive dog called Beethoven.

📺On TV, across the Atlantic, NBC airs the final episode of Dear John, starring Judd Hirsch. It was a remake of the BBC show of the same name—they kept the same theme song too.

🎶 Number One song in the UK Top 40 is still Jimmy Nail with ‘Ain’t No Doubt’. But gaining in the Top 10 is…

This week’s Number 2: ‘Rhythm Is A Dancer’ — Snap!

One of the worst feelings in the world is when you’re haunted by something you once said, especially if you didn’t particularly mean to say it.

I, personally, stand by very few of the things I say. My chats tend to be a stream-of-consciousness word salad, with things coming out of my mouth that are as surprising to me as they are to my interlocutors.

It’s nerve-wracking because I know that whenever you speak, there’s always a chance your words will have unintended consequences. Some people have ruined their whole lives by saying the wrong thing.

In the internet age, there’s an even greater chance of that happening to you.

In 2000, a guy called Bradley Chait received an email from Claire Swires, a girl he was seeing, in which she made a joke about oral sex (“Yours was yum!”) Chait caddishly forwarded this email to his friends (adding “that’s a nice compliment from a lass”), and they forwarded it to their friends, and so on until it became a worldwide viral sensation.

Chait and Swires probably each spent no more than a few seconds on their respective emails. But their words haunted them for a long time. The same has happened to thousands of ordinary people in the 22 years since then.

But at least Chait and Swain both chose to write what they wrote.

Imagine how frustrating it would be if you were famous for saying something that your boss had forced you to say.

The internet’s first wartime meme

Durron Butler was born in Pittsburgh in 1967. As a young man, he played drums in a heavy metal band, but a career in music was not forthcoming.

Bored, he joined the army and shipped out to Germany. It was the early 80s, and the Eurodance scene was in its infancy, but Butler hung around clubs and got to know some of the DJs and producers who were driving things forward.

Butler started experimenting with hip hop and adopted the rapper name Turbo D. He completed his service, moved to Brooklyn, and befriended The Fat Boys (who had a couple of minor novelty hits in the late 80s and made some low-budget comedies.) When The Fat Boys announced a European tour, they asked Tubo D to support them.

On his return to Europe, Turbo D reconnected with his old raver friends and met two producers who were struggling with their new track. They wanted to include some hip-hop elements, but they couldn’t find a good rapper.

Would Turbo D like to lay down some vocals?

He said yes, and the session was dynamite. Benito Benites and John "Virgo" Garrett III, collectively known as Snap!, had found a rapper who could be their group’s “lyrical Jesse James”.

‘The Power’ was a barnstorming global hit in 1990, and Turbo B was now—technically—one of the most commercially successful rappers in the world.

On Snap!’s second album, The Madman’s Return, Turbo B got a chance to experiment a little. Track 2, ‘Colour of Love’, is a funky R’n’B number in which Turbo seductively raps about how racism would be over if we all just had sex with each other.

This was his favourite track on the record, and the one that he wanted to see released as a single. He got his wish. ‘Colour of Love’ made the Top 10 in Germany, but failed to chart in the UK or the US.

Turbo B did not want track 9 on the album to be released. He argued strongly that it should remain an album track.

Although he only appears on the song’s middle eight, he hated the track and especially hated his verse on it. When Benites and Garrett gave him the lyrics, he’s rumoured to have said, “no way am I singing that shit!”

But they wouldn’t back down or make changes. He relented and recorded his verse.

The song is good, but the rap is quite bad. Turbo B, never the best rapper in the world, delivers these lyrics like he’s just back from the dentist. The penultimate line is a bit of a disaster. It’s the one that goes:

Got to be what you wanna
If the groove don't get you, the rifle's gonna

That doesn’t flow well, and Turbo B makes little effort to sell it. Perhaps because he’s dreading the line that comes next:

I’m as serious as cancer
When I say rhythm is a dancer

Back in 2008, a now-defunct music website to find the worst song lyric of all time.

The list included some classics like:

• “Only time can tell if we’ll stand the test of time” (‘Why Can’t This Be Love’, Van Halen)

• “She had dumps like a truck, truck, truck” (‘The Thong Song’, Sisqo)

• “I don't want to see a ghost, it's a sight that I fear the most, I'd rather have a piece of toast” (‘Life’, Des'ree)

The list does not include my personal nominee for worst lyric (Celine Dion’s “This is getting serious/Are you thinking about you or us?”) or, y’know, literally anything by Black Eyed Peas.

Instead, Snap!’s “Cancer/Dancer” rhyme was crowned Worst Lyric of All Time. Since then, it’s featured high in almost every list of cringey pop moments.

Why is it so reviled?

It’s mostly because of the bathos of the rhyme. Here’s a definition of bathos if you’re not familiar with the term:

Bathos: an effect of anticlimax created by an unintentional lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculous.

“I’m as serious as cancer” is quite a striking line, and Turbo B lands really hard on the word cancer. It’s like he wants to you stop throwing shapes at the teenage disco and start thinking about your nan’s glioblastoma.

Okay, Turbo B. We’re listening.

“When I say…”

Tell us the truth. We can take it.

“..rhythm is a dancer.”

Boom. Bathos.

Poor old Turbo B. He’s not even the first person to use that rhyme. Eric B and Rakim (praised as geniuses in this very newsletter just a few weeks ago) once used the lyric:

I got a question as serious as cancer
Who can keep the average dancer
Hyper as a heart attack?

But there are some crucial differences. First of all, the rhyme makes more sense in this context.

Also, Rakim is a much better rapper than Turbo B.

The conversation about the “cancer/dancer” rhyme seems to have intensified over the last 20 years. To be honest, I don’t really remember a lot of people caring about it before the internet.

But in our Extremely Online age, we need a constant supply of meat for our digital conversations. There are dozens of forum chats from the past decade talking about the awfulness of this lyric. A search of Twitter shows hundreds of people making jokes about it over the years. It has become a meme.

This is why Cancel Culture is intimidating to some people. There’s a feeling that the stakes are so much higher now when we open our mouths.

We’ve seen people lose their jobs for making an ill-judged joke or trying to be an edgelord or getting horny on main. Even if you suffer consequences, you could end up receiving abuse or spending your life as a punchline.

Sometimes that’s good. We should all probably think a little bit more about what we say, and try to say fewer things that are demonstrably stupid (especially if what we say is damaging to someone else.)

But sometimes, it leads to self-censorship. I don’t think Turbo B would have dropped those bars if Twitter existed in the 90s, even if Snap! put a gun to his head. He would know that it would lead to merciless piss-taking on social media.

And that would be sad. Because then we wouldn’t have ‘Rhythm Is A Dancer’.

Elsewhere in the charts

Number 5 (New Entry): ‘This Used To Be My Playground’ — Madonna

TOM HANKS: There’s no crying in baseball!
MADONNA:

Number 10 (↑ from 13): ‘Shake Your Head (Let’s Go To Bed)’ — Was (Not Was)

Speaking of Madonna, she provided guest vocals on the original version of this track, way back in 1982 when she was just a small baby. That version is available on the album Born to Laugh at Tornadoes, and is a much more experimental New Wave track then this chart-friendly bop.

When Was (Not Was) rerecorded it in 1992, Ozzy Osbourne agreed to return, but Madonna was now far too famous. Fortunately, Kim Basinger was happy to go full sex kitten and purr along over the top. She can’t really sing, but she does sound good.

Number 12 (New Entry): ‘Who Is It?’ — Michael Jackson

This is almost a great song.

It’s clearly intended as a kind of sequel to ‘Billie Jean’, and the build-up sounds like MJ is going to deliver. It’s got a future-facing R’n’B rhythm and an excellent bridge. But then the chorus lands and it’s… Well, it’s okay. It’s fine. But it’s not in the same galaxy as Billie Jean.

This is the whole issue with the post-Off The Wall/Thriller/Bad era. When you’ve reached the top of the mountain, there’s nowhere left to go but down.

Number 28 (New Entry): ‘Warm It Up’ — Kris Kross

The difficult second single from Kris Kross. Actually a decent effort, it just doesn’t have the lightning-in-a-bottle magic of ‘Jump’.

Number 34 (New Entry): ‘57 Channels (And Nothin’ On)’ — Bruce Springsteen

An underrated entry in The Boss’s canon.

While the idea of 57 channels might now seem quaint, there’s something very zeitgeist-ey about the story of an ordinary man being slowly driven mad by the media. Bruce should do a new 2022 version. Call it ‘Keep Refreshing Facebook (And Nothing But Racism and Minions Memes)‘.

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Album of the Week

ΚΕΦΑΛΗΞΘ, or, Psalm 69: The Way to Succeed and The Way to Suck Eggs — Ministry

Ministry recorded their first album in 1983, and listening to it now is such a trip. Al Jourgensen, volatile pioneer of industrial metal, used to play synths and sing like Marc Almond.

But this first album is perhaps the key to understanding Big Al (the only constant member of Ministry these past 40 years.) He’s not someone who’s bound to a particular musical philosophy. He’s a genre slut who goes wherever he is led by his muse.

And by his drug addiction. Drugs are such a big part of Psalm 69 that Jourgensen’s dealer deserves a songwriting credit.

In 1989, Ministry released the album The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste, which did sufficient numbers to warrant a $750,000 advance. Jourgensen and guitarist Mike Scaccia immediately set about spending this money as quickly as possible on coke, heroin and whiskey. Very little of it went on making music.

After a couple of years, the label started getting edgy, so they moved the party to a studio and hoped that some music would just kind of happen. A very drunk Gibby Haynes (of The Butthole Surfers) dropped into one of these sessions and started goofing on the mic, shouting nonsense like “wah wah wah” and “ding dang a dong” and “bing bong bing”.

Jourgensen realized that music was indeed happening. He spent three straight days cutting all this gibberish together until it sounded like a coherent tune, and then the band laid down some riffs on top of it. After much refinement, the track became ‘Jesus Built My Hotrod’.

Jourgensen once described this songwriting process as being “like pulling a diamond out of a septic tank.”

Eagle-eyed readers might recall that last week’s review of The Orb claimed that a lot of artists don’t get high when they’re working in the studio.

That’s kind of true in the case of Psalm 69. Ministry were effectively two bands at this point—the users (Jourgensen and Scaccia) and the non-users (who Jourgensen referred to as “The Book Club”.)

The Junkies and The Book Club worked almost in isolation from each other, then edited each other’s work. Jourgensen claims that he and Scaccia ended up creating the entire album by themselves—Bassist Paul Baker (the de facto leader of The Book Club) disagrees.

Regardless of who’s right, it all feeds into the fabulous tension of Psalm 69, an album that comes roaring out of the gate with the ass-kicking single ‘N.W.O.’

Maybe the best place to hear this tension is on ‘TV II’, which is almost a call-and-response song that alternatates between The Book Club making bursts of pure noise with Jourgensen screaming (a capella) about the state of modern media.

Could anything ever unite The Junkies and The Book Club? How about some guest vocals from a legendary author who is also a legendary smackhead? William Burroughs appears on the ode to jonesing, ‘Just One Fix’, and even makes an appearance in the video:

Psalm 69 is an extraordinary mess of a record that always feels on the brink of total collapse. Somehow, amazingly, it all hangs together. Much like the band that made it.

Next Week

A fine romance with Sophie B. Hawkins. Plus, we get down and dirty with Sonic Youth