Asymmetric Music

I felt flattered when my friend commissioned me to write a song for his new game, Yikerz!** and immediately set about to conjure a work worthy of both Yikerz! and my grandest musical ambitions.

I followed the usual pre-writing process: I played the game for two days strait days on an ancient California Redwood; meditated; locked myself up in a Native American sweat box, completely naked except for twelve Yikerz! pieces; took a magnetism course at the JC; learned the etymology of the word "Yikerz." I really immersed myself in everything Yikerz! to cultivate a suitable frame of mind.

I then stocked my summer retreat with luncheon meats and Pepsi, sealed the door, and went to work.

"The song must be bold, yet delicate; original, yet comforting, as if one were listening to his mother coo a lullaby; contemporary, yet for-the-ages."

I eschewed the overdone cantata form and found Free-Form Jazz too restricting. I tried to add lyrics to the experimental Bollywood-filmi-Prussian-death-dirge fusion I had on the shelf. It wasn't right. I had hit a mental block.

My friend Joe Weezle called,

"Yo, my nizzle! Wassup with the Blozzle?"

He invited me to the club so that we could clock the hos, drizzle some forties, and generally, get crunk.

"Fo shizzle, but one of my Gs needs a song"

"Is that for Yikerz!?"

"Fo shizz"

"Yo, we got that"

It was a revelation! They had managed to prism the torment of ideas in my head into one thin beam of genius. I offered to pay, but he insisted that he needed to reciprocate for the street cred I gave his rap ensemble, the 5-Star Generalz (I came up with the idea of putting a "z" at the end of the name).

The podcast above is the result. "Yo, you solid, Weez. Azymmetric, out"

Warning!

Middlebrow conformists ("square bears from Delaware") not attuned to the current trends in urban art might not understand the meaning of the work outside of its native context. You can try to live the life of an oppressed ghetto child (or read the article describing it in this month's Utne Reader) or just try to open your mind to new ideas, for once.

Others might be offended by the language. Good! That shudder of disgust you experience as you listen to "Yikerz" is art shaking you, awakening your pathetically ignorant self to the truth. Now, go out there and live!

This is 5-Star. I was supposed to kick it with them that night, but grades were due the next day and I had to correct a bunch of papers.

**This post is only a joke. My friend might like 5 Star Generalz, but I doubt it. This song has nothing to do with his game.
-

First, the "One."

Next, the inspiration for that line (Caution: Profanity.).

Why would less taxes, lower unemployment, and lower interest rates hurt blacks? Beats me. Since Reagan was so bad for Latinos, immigration during this time must have been very low (Ha!).

What this genius meant to say was that people who didn't work failed to see their income rise as much as that of people who did. Isn't his drift kind of insulting? Those blacks who followed Regan's advice did very well, according to Larry Elder:

...Reagan's policies hurt black people, wrong again. Under Reagan, black adult unemployment fell faster than did white unemployment. Black teenage unemployment fell faster than did white teenage unemployment.

And blacks started businesses at a rate faster than did whites, with the pace of revenues exceeding that of whites. In 1981, the nation's poverty rate stood at 14 percent. It declined to 11.6 percent in 1988, Reagan's last year in office.

Perhaps Giuliani, who was serving under Reagan at the time, should have come on the scene to clean up the pimps and hos as well as reduce welfare and crime in the eighties (He wouldn't have done anything about the "fag hags" since he's considered "pro-gay," whatever that is.). Maybe there wouldn't be a need for "the Message." A mixed blessing, I must admit since it's a great song. Here it is without the dumb commentary: