Wednesday 10 December 2008

Smartening up rap music

As my colleague and time-wasting companion No Good Boyo has recently explained, he and I have come up with a plot to render rap, hip - and furthermore hop - music socially acceptable by asking the conceptual question "If this was being recited tunelessly over a repetitive rhythm by a decent chap with a sound public-school classical education under his correctly positioned and properly-tightened belt rather than a mumbling ghetto indigene with his trousers slipping down around his unwashed ankles, what words would be used?"

This train of thought led to the previous post, which - arriving unannounced and unexplained like a Burmese baby in a cardboard box on a Tory MP's doorstep as it did - seems to have confused more than it amused.

While Boyo applied his misshapen head to the improvement of Mr Schoolly D's lyrical outpourings (though he was unable to answer my query as to whether the School in question was Charterhouse or Winchester), I turned instead to Mr 50 Cent, duly relabelled 'Mr Ten Shillings'; whose 'In da club' I have thus reworked for a more upmarket-audience, to be sung to an appropriately uplifting tune:

At One's Club
Proceed, young lady chap, it's your birthday
We shall celebrate as if it's your birthday,
We shall sip Chateau Lafitte (the 92) as if it's your birthday,
And you know we're not unduly concerned that it isn't actually your birthday!

You can find one at one's club,
A magnum full of champagne
Look Mater I have a bag of ether,
If you fancy the idea of illegal substances I would not be averse to intimacy
So come give me a hug if you need the application of embrocation
When I park, you see the Bentley badge
Decent chaps heard I put one over on Dre*,
Now their appreciation has appreciated appreciably
When you sell like M&Ms, and the garden tools they wish to use
If you watch how I move you'll mistake me for a professional cricketer...

It continues, but is anyone going to read even this far?

*Presumably Reginald 'Tooler' Dre, leg spinner for Northants 1953-60

9 comments:

No Good Boyo said...

Good work, Gyppo. Just a minor point: I think the fellow likes to be called "Ten Bob" these days, and he's referring to Maj Wiimbourne "Horsey" Dray, the champion javelin-catcher at the Dorset Blazing.

Carry on.

Gyppo Byard said...

I stand corrected.
Didn't Dray win the shot-heading contest as well?

Ms Scarlet said...

When I park, you see the Bentley badge

This line has given me something of a thrill. I'm not altogether sure why....?
Sx

Gyppo Byard said...

Scarlet - at the risk of disappointing you, my own car is only Bentley in the adverbial sense.

Ms Scarlet said...

Oh well, it's the sentence that matters...
Sx

Pearl said...

I don't normally LOL. But I did.
God help me, I did.
Pearl

Anonymous said...

try to incorporate history of taxation in cypress hill-esque latino thugz rap and I will pass the exam with flying colors

Gadjo Dilo said...

Safe! (Is that right?) I'm starting to "get" this now. How more acceptable this music would be if delivered by a laughing policeman, and what better places our ghettos would be as well - right, kids?

No Good Boyo said...

Right again about Dray, Gyppo. He retired after the unfortunate "football boot foul" at the last face-jumping tournament, and now teaches Classics at Wellington.

Wordver: redist. Someone who has been insulted once again.