Songs that Changed the Landscape of Human Thought and Understanding: Khia's "My Neck, My Back (Lick It)"

Khia's "My Neck, My Back (Lick It)" is such a dynamic and challenging song that it's literally impossible to write about (at least in the United States). In fact, parts of this text have been redacted by the government, who invoked the infamous Too Soon Clause, an obscure part of the USA-PATRIOT Act of 2001, to legally censor the apparently offending passages. So I hope this will not be too difficult to read.

For decades, the Secret League of Wealthy Ass Female Feminists had conspired to make a massively popular song about having their CENSORED CENSORED. They had met severe resistance, however, from the pious yet hypocritically lecherous Super Sausage Team of Money Printing Gentleman, who thought discussing CENSORED CENSORED was in poor taste. Ironically, this was the same Team who allowed The Beatles' "Please Please Me" to be a huge hit in 1963. In that song, John Lennon sings, during the bridge, "I do all the pleasin' with you / It's so hard to reason with you / Oh yeah, why do you make me blue?" Clearly, Lennon is singing about how he CENSORED CENSORED on his female love-interest who refuses to CENSORED, leaving him with an annoyingly painful case of CENSORED CENSORED. Within days of its release, teenage girls around the world were screaming and CENSORED CENSORED for their favorite Beatle no matter where they were. The Super Sausage Team of Money Printing Gentleman was please please pleased (forgive the pun), and they decided to print more money and get the older gentlemen on the team to public slander the lovable Moptops to fulfill the dynamics of Marx and Hegel's dialectic.

Fast forward to 2002. The United States was still emotionally reeling from the terrorist attacks in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001 that took over 3,000 lives. A little over six months after the tragedy, the Secret League decided to stick it to the man while he was down, with his massively CENSORED CENSORED CENSORED metaphorically CENSORED in New York City. Their secret plan: release Khia's "My Neck, My Back (Lick It)" to a wounded public that needed to forget about the tragic events of that day and hear a brilliant, witty song about a woman demanding that her CENSORED and CENSORED get CENSORED.

The plan worked effectively. Khia's song, which begins rather minimally with simple percussion and speakerbox-rattlin' bass, quickly transforms itself into serious, polyrhythmic, sexual anthem Marvin Gaye would have been jealous of. Khia's insistence that her man "put your neck into it" and "to suck it off til I shake" is completely direct. At first, it appears that she is demanding that this objectified male (much to the chagrin of the Super Sausage Team of Money Printing Gentleman, who had historically only been concerned about their own pleasure) lick her neck, her back, her "pussy" (i.e. feline, or kitty cat), and her "crack" (i.e. her stash of cocaine-infused with baking soda-rocks). But that makes no sense. Cats clean themselves by licking. Cats already hate being washed by humans, tongue or no. And why would you lick a crack rock when you're supposed to smoke it (or so I've read) to get the desired two-minute high? As the song slowly builds, it becomes apparent what she is really telling this soon-to-be-duped Lothario is to CENSORED CENSORED CENSORED and CENSORED CENSORED CENSORED CENSORED until she's "makin' faces 'n stuff." This brings a whole new meaning to the phrase CENSORED CENSORED. When she tells her male love interest to "get on your knees," she proceeds to liberate all CENSORED from the tyranny of the Super Sausage Team which had insured that rap music over the previous fifteen years would be male-dominated. While two big CENSORED in the CENSORED were nothing but CENSORED in the heart of CENSORED CENSORED CENSORED, Americans of all shapes and genders of consenting age could now get licked wherever they wanted and get on their knees and lick whatever they wanted, except for that kitty cat. There's nothing more embarrassing and potentially incriminating than a face full of claw-marks!

Redacted by CENSORED CENSORED.

Songs that Changed the Landscape of Human Thought and Understanding: Daniel Powter's "Bad Day"

Has there ever been a pop hit that anybody could relate to more than Daniel Powter's chart-topping 2005 masterpiece "Bad Day"? I mean, how many times have you opened your Facebook page and read the following update status from one of your friends?: "I forgot to set the alarm and now I'm stuck in traffic. Already having a bad day." These minor setbacks at the beginning of the day--though hilarious to read on Facebook--really can affect the way each one of us proceeds through the next new day. The more embarrassing bad days are never made Facebook Official though: waking up to discover that one is out of clean underwear and will have to go the whole day with that "not-so-fresh feeling" of walking around in public in yesterday's smelly knickers; accidentally bad-mouthing your prospective employer's product during a job interview; or getting a promotion at work only to find out, after being plied with martinis by your bosses and co-workers, that your spouse waited for you to get home to tell you he or she got laid 0ff. Now these sorts of bad days reflect the sort possible only in developed countries. In some parts of the world, a bad day means another day without water or food, having more severe pains in your distended belly, or losing three limbs and being the only survivor in your family of an armed attack by a ruthless state-sponsored militia. Daniel Powter's "Bad Day" reminds us that all of these things are possible with an empathy recalling Walt Whitman's line from "Song of Myself" (1855): "I am the man...I suffered...I was there."

More impressive is that several of the rather ambiguous lines in the verses allude to some of the worst "bad days" in the history of mankind. When Powter sings, "You kick up the leaves and the magic is lost," he is clearly alluding to the Biblical fall of man, when Adam ate the forbidden fruit and became ashamed of his own nakedness. A bad day indeed. "You're faking a smile with a coffee to go," though topically referring to our contemporary culture's NEED for gourmet coffees, obliquely refers to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain having to tell his wife Anne, in the early hours of September 30, 1938, that he had signed the Munich Pact to appease Adolf Hitler and his forces. Easily one of the worst days of the 20th Century. Powter's intertextual brilliance is even more apparent during the chorus, in which he repeats the phrase "bad day" 529126 times, recalling the monotonous ending to The Beatles' "Hey Jude." In that song, Paul McCartney sings, "Hey Jude, don't make it bad / Take a sad song and make it better." Powter pays homage to the ultimate "gets-stuck-in-your-head" song by similarly singing, "You sing a sad song just to turn it around." Powter's grasp of the universality of the "bad day" and the proper way to cope with one--the art of post-modern meditation or chant through repetition in verse--reveals an artistic depth rarely matched in the post-World War II era. While a few of the song's cynical naysayers would have you believe that Powter's utterance of the phrase "bad day" 529126 times inevitably gets stuck in the listener's head--subliminally suggesting that they will indeed have a bad day each time they hear the song--Daniel Powter's "Bad Day" is a testament to and acknowledgment of these kinds of moments in our lives. It also provides us access to the closure we need to get past these "bad days." Oh, and one more thing: bad day.

Songs that Changed the Landscape of Human Thought and Understanding: Herman's Hermits' "I'm Henry VIII, I Am"

For far too long, acts like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Yardbirds, The Kinks, The Dave Clark Five, The Animals, and Gerry and the Pacemakers have been the face of the so-called "British Invasion." Sure, these bands had some nice tunes and good ideas. But none of them were anywhere near as brilliant as Herman's Hermits, who faithfully drew inspiration from the music and illustrious history of the British people to create one of the 1960s' most powerful and intellectually engaging hit singles, "I'm Henry VIII, I Am," their sixth U.S. hit single, in 1965.

Rarely has a pop tune been so directly engaged with the intellectual legacy of the West. Sure, The Beatles had songs that some classically-trained music reviewers in the 1960s said bore echoes of classical masters such as Frederic Chopin and Ludwig van Beethoven. But they had nothing on Herman's Hermits. Sure, "I'm Henery the Eighth, I Am" was originally written and recorded in 1910 by British music hall legend Harry Champion. But the Hermits--Peter Noone, Karl Green, Barry Whitwam, Derek Leckenby, and Keith Hopwood--were clearly in command of their song selection and knew that this supposedly simple classic tune was anything but. In fact, the track tackles some of the headiest notions in Western Philosophy.

Philosophers will readily admit that the opening lyric, "I'm Henry the Eighth, I Am," is a direct critique of Rene Descartes' dictum first described in Meditationes de prima philosophia (1641), translated into English as "I think, therefore I am." Herman's Hermits' implicit joking reply is "I think, therefore I'm Henry the Eighth, I Am." This interpretation reveals an understanding of the ideas of Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, who posited in Scienza Nuova (1725) that history essentially repeats itself, or that it is a cyclical force. Herman's Hermits' brilliant revision of the original tune erases all but the chorus, and repeats it three times during the one minute and forty-nine secord duration of the recording. This insistence on repetition is validated when lead singer Peter Noone seemingly tosses off the line "Second verse, same as the first." Consequently, the apparent primary joke of the song--that Henry the Eighth does not refer to the scandalous and oft-married British monarch who reigned from 1509 to 1547 but to a man named Henry who is married to a woman who has married seven other Henrys before him--is merely secondary. History even repeats itself in the lyric's narrative.

HAS YOUR MIND BEEN BLOWN OR WHAT? When The Beatles were singing silly tunes like "Drive My Car" and The Rolling Stones were claiming that "Time is on My Side" (which is, of course, a total non sequitur, since time is an abstract concept and therefore outside the purview of geometry), Herman's Hermits were grappling with the giants of Western philosophy, essentially refuting Cartesian thought whilst insisting on the Viconian cycle. They also applied the aesthetic of Gertrude Stein in her experimental novel The Making of Americans (1925) to help them realize the self-reflexivity of repetition in popular music. Long before pretentious music snobs lauded songs like The Fall's "Repetition," Flipper's "Brainwash," Laurie Anderson's "O Superman," or Lil Wayne's "A Milli," Herman's Hermits' proved themselves to be amongst the most precocious and brilliant group of musicians of all repeated time.