Unintentionally, Mrs. Scribbler gave me the alley-oop for this week's intro as we were watching one of my favorite movies that surprisingly didn't make the "Tuesday Night at the Movies" cut, the perpetually-hilarious White Men Can't Jump. (Truth be told, I'm actually pretty salty with myself for excluding it because I'm always quoting it and I watch it every time it comes on TV, but I digress.) So one of my favorite parts is when Billy (Woody Harrelson) has to shoot his way back into girlfriend Gloria's (Rosie Perez) good graces after blowing his stack on a bet that he could defy the myth that...wait for it...White men can't jump. Sidney (Wesley Snipes) takes him to the b-ball court where his boy Robert (Cylk Cozart), who's a security guard on the lot where Jeopardy is shot, is willing to get her on the show if Billy makes a shot. When he assumes that he's shooting toward a much easier goal, Robert's partner-in-crime Zeke (Kevin Benton) stands up and says, "No, no, no, no, Billy boy, this is Ghana. You, my friend, are shooting for the Sudan." After the always-funny "and a hook shot", everyone on the court waits with baited breath as Billy does his best Sky Hook from long distance, hits the difficult shot, the crowd goes wild and it immediately cuts to the old school Jeopardy music--and the best version of it, I might add. Yeah, classic stuff right there. Now that I've inspired you to go watch White Men Can't Jump, try to hold off for a while and tough out another edition of "RANDOM THOUGHT ALERTS!!!" first...
Now I usually start off these "Rave & Favorite Five" posts with either some kind of sentimental tale about my storied past with a particular artist, movie, event, etc., or some excuse as to why you had to wait a few weeks for me to unveil the next slot. However, instead of boring you with the minutiae, I'd rather kick off this post doing what I rarely do: shine a quick light on a much-deserved honorable mention. Of all of the music for which legendary producer Nile Rodgers has been responsible--David Bowie's "Let's Dance", Madonna's "Like a Virgin" and pretty much everything by Chic (with one-time production partner Bernard Edwards) just to name a few numbers--absolutely nothing tops "The King's Motorcade" IMHO. When King Jaffe Joffer (James Earl Jones) comes from the Kingdom of Zamunda to America looking for his son Prince Akeem (Eddie Murphy) after Semi (Arsenio Hall) requested "a cool million", "The King's Motorcade" was the ideal sonic depiction of the importance of his arrival in one of the most regal and bouse ways. (By the way, you must say "bouse" like Rick Ross or Slim Thug because the pronunciation of "boss" just doesn't cut it.) I fought myself over what this musical masterpiece could replace in the following top five, but I couldn't bring myself to knocking off any of these things that make Coming to America my No. 2 favorite movie of all time. Without further ado, let's spin that globe, flip that coin and take a trip to Queens...
Poor The Last Dragon soundtrack. You did your best to stay in my consciousness. I wrote a solid post about your movie and constantly had you on my mind because, like The Last Dragon itself, you're pretty friggin' awesome. You had a firm leg up on such competition as Miki Howard's "Baby, Be Mine"--which was only holding on until recently because of the TV One movie, Love Under New Management: The Miki Howard Story--by having not one but two songs stuck in my brain: Willie Hutch's "The Glow" and DeBarge's "Rhythm of the Night". In the end, however, you got beat out by party records, indie artists, originals and remakes, Philly soul and children's songs. This was your best shot to make this countdown, but you blew it. Maybe if I watch The Last Dragon again sometime soon, then you'll make the cut. Okay...so now that I've effectively dragged a soundtrack as if it were a real person--yes, I'm a bit touched--let's get to the songs that harassed me even more...
The easy part of doing "RANDOM THOUGHT ALERTS!!!" is sifting through my brain to recall the most random thoughts and observations throughout the week or month that will tickle every one of you who actually entertain me. However, the hard part is figuring out an interesting introductory paragraph, but like everything else about this series, things just happen by the grace of God and often out of nowhere. Hence, we have a lovely Maryland license plate and I'm sure you're wondering what's the significance of it. Well, here's a secret about me: I'm a numbers fanatic and looking at the back of license plates allows me to feed my fetish. The game is simple: I take the bigger number, divide it by the smaller number and see if I can get a quotient without a remainder. I cannot in this case, but the way that my brain is setup, I said to myself, "If that bigger number was 9045, then the quotient would be 1005." I'll break it down even further by a number like 3, 5, or 15 and come up with further quotients like 335, 201 and 67, respectively--and this is all in my head. Yup...been this much of a certified dork since 1987, but I bet you'll ask me to figure out the tip at dinner instead of wasting your time with a calculator. Now when you start talking calculus, that's the only time in my life when I needed a tutor, so I might not be the guy you wanna talk to about that. With that said, let's get random, kiddies and ducklings...
When Momma Scribbler, Big Little Brother Scribbler (when he was actually Little Little Brother Scribbler) and I moved to Halley Terrace in Southeast D.C. in the summer of 1988, it took my mother about six months before she broke down and purchased cable for the first time. One of the channels that my brother and I gravitated toward was BET and among so many awesome aspects to the only channel at the time that was owned by and featured Black people, I remember always looking forward to Black Music Month in June. You would think that a predominantly Black network couldn't do it up any more for a month dedicated to our musical legacy, but with more throwback and world premiere videos as well as a few specials, they managed to drum up the excitement regardless. While BET has channeled more of their Black Music Month energy into the BET Awards, I've decided to keep that initial legacy going in my own way and specifically dedicate this month's edition of "In Heavy Rotation" to my fellow brothas and sistas with a mixture of the old and the new. Flipping one of Ol' Dirty Bastard's opening lines from "Triumph", let's take it back to '89--although none of these albums were made in '89, but you get the point...
