Pedagogical Utilizations of the Chicken Noodle Soup dance in Higher Education

1. I made my (elite private university) Introduction to Ethnomusicology class do the "Chicken Noodle Soup" dance on Wednesday (pedagogical rationale here). The weird part (OK, that is the weird part, but the other weird part…) was that out of 70 or so students only one had ever heard of it before. It’s amazing and intriguing to me that in this day and age a song can be that huge in New York and totally unknown in Boston. Maybe we don’t live in a Walmartian monoculture yet after all…Any theories, Jay Smooth?

2. I did appreciate Masta Ace and the "off-beat, on-beat" style he was rocking in the early nineties, and I did like his song on Heavy Rhyme Experience (an album that everyone loved at the time, but no one seems to remember now…). But I have to admit, I didn’t really dig him until the song "Saturday Night Live" (1993), which featured a nice Ramsey Lewis sample and the following angrily-delivered lines:

I got a mad knife
and I’m mad mean
I kill mad crews
I read mad magazine

"Now there’s a dude that doesn’t take himself too seriously," I thought. It was a quality that was already slipping away from hip-hop even then, and now, in 2006, it’s hard to remember it was ever there at all. But even Rakim had jokes, though he brought new meaning to the word "deadpan": "I’m the R to the A to the K-I-M / if wasn’t, why would I say I am?" You have to admit, that’s funny.

Masta Ace was also (along with Lord Finesse, of course) one of the innovators of compound rhyme in hip-hop, something that, unlike certain other MCs, Eminem has taken pains to give him credit for. Anyway, I always checked for him.

Since he’s a real MC, Ace’s lyrics have continued to evolve to represent his changing life experiences, which now means the life experience of a moderately successful hip-hop artist in his thirties. In the late nineties, he popped up on a mixtape I was listening to with a cut called "Last Breath", which contained the following lines:

I’m a sad soul
Probably rap ‘til I’m mad old
And sound like the D.O.C. with a bad cold
I’ll show a young whippersnapper rapper I’m greater
Then have to rest later
On a respirator, yo.

For you young’uns, the D.O.C. was an excellent MC out of Texas, who moved to Los Angeles, wrote lyrics for NWA, put out one totally underrated album (No One Can Do It Better (1989); "Whirlwind Pyramid" was my jam), then got his laryx crushed in a car accident, which pretty much ended his career as a performer. So this punchline is both totally offensive and also kind of bittersweet in that it does call to mind the way some of hip-hop’s best artists have been screwed by destiny and forgotten. The second part is even more poignant, in the vision that it presents. What does happen to old MC’s? The older I get, the more I appreciate the image he creates of a cranky old man with a husky, whispery voice, basically climbing out of a hospital bed to roast some cocky young MC, then getting back into bed and going to sleep. "Young whippersnapper rapper", indeed.

So anyway, I’d been meaning to buy his latest album, A Long Hot Summer, since it came out last year, but something had always held me back. Then I heard an interview with him last week on The Sound of Young America*, and took it as a sign. Good move on my part – it’s a great album. Basically it’s about being in your thirties and not really having achieved what you think you should have achieved by now. Not being despondent or bitter, necessarily, but still waiting. As Lord Finesse once put it: "I’m on that ‘get rich’ list – they just didn’t call my name yet." Many of us can relate.

On "Da Grind", Ace rhymes:

Now if you call me and I'm not around
I'm probably putting my grind down
Doing shows out of town
I be the manager, road manager, and call handler
Booking agent, choreographer and tour planner
I be the V.P. of marketing and promotions
Producer and arranger, with a range of emotions.
And after it all, I still gotta perform
At three o'clock in the morn', when half the fans are gone
But it's fine…
(adapted from www.ohhla.com)

I guarantee you that that rhyme – not the videos you see on BET, not MTV Cribs - represents the real life of the overwhelming majority of professional hip-hop artists. But who else is talking about it? Who else is being honest? How the hell did hip-hop get to the point where we even need to ask?

* The Sound of Young America describes itself as "A Radio Show About Things That Are Awesome". You should be listening to it for the following reasons:

1. It consists of interviews with comics that I like, musicians that I like and other cool people.

2.The host, Jesse Thorn is extremely knowledgeable about pretty much everything, but in a way that is sympathetic, rather than show-offy. I'll put it like this: I’ve heard him interview both the fifties comic Shelly Berman and Houston Rapper Devin the Dude in such a way as to suggest that he had known and loved both of their work for years.

3. It’s free. You can sign up for the podcast or download it at maximumfun.org

4. A lot of people, when they interview professional comedians, try to riff with them and end up getting in way over their heads. Others just play it totally straight, leaving the comic sounding completely out of their element. Jesse Thorn riffs exactly the right amount. This is an extremely subtle art, and it makes it possible to listen to the show without cringing.