Cory Doctorow
I can't remember where I first heard dancehall reggae, but I do remember where I bought most of my dancehall cassettes: at Play De Record, a great hip hop/reggae DJ store on Yonge Street in Toronto whose bins were all killer, no filler. I'd go into the store every couple weeks and more or less pick three albums at random and love every one of 'em. I just discovered that PDR is still in business, which makes me extremely happy:
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Cory Doctorow
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/17/holy-batfu-its-an-apple/#ba-schnicker-bah-snchnucker
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Cory Doctorow
Look, I know that mostly I use this blog to talk about tech politics, monopoly, impending fascism and the climate emergency, with the odd science fiction review. But all that other stuff (modulo the sf novels) are weighing on my heavily this week, and I feel like posting something a little more lighthearted. So I consulted my editor (me), who called a special meeting of the editorial board (also me), who kicked it up to the publisher (still me).
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Cory Doctorow
They all agreed that I could write a post about a weird hip-hop album that's been earworming me in the best way imaginable since 1992.
I'm pretty sure I bought Fu-Schnickens' debut album "F.U. Don't Take It Personal" at Play De Record. Certainly, I have a memory of stopping on the sidewalk outside of the store to wrestle the cellophane off the cassette and pop it into my walkman. I *definitely* remember my first walk through the city with the music in my ears. I laughed aloud.
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Cory Doctorow
Several times. I might have even danced a little:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2wD7FbIzGI&list=PLJw--ySHyZNwsmLcxfW3NWTyxQX7mARas
At the time, I knew nothing about Fu-Shnickens. In the years since, I have listened to *F.U. Don't Take It Personal* approximately one heptillion times and somehow managed not to learn anything about Fu-Shcnickens.
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Cory Doctorow
Today, I read their all-too-short Wikipedia article and learned that the group was together between 1988 and 1995, that their second album (which I remember not being as impressed with) had a top-40 novelty track with vocals by Shaquille O'Neal, who said the Schnickens were his favorite hiphop group:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Schnickens
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Cory Doctorow
I get it, Shaq. They're great. First of all, they're *incredibly* silly. Long before Wu-Tang Clan, they were doing this weird kung-fu movie schtick in their songs (which, admittedly, walks an uncomfortable line between "parodies of racist depictions of Chinese people in the movies" to racist" parodies of Chinese people in the style of those movies"). Their songs are *jammed* with pop culture references in a way that puts, say, *Paul's Boutique* to shame.
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Cory Doctorow
You can get a sense of this by looking at the lyrics transcribed over at Genius (where they are criminally under-annotated):
https://genius.com/artists/Fu-schnickens
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Cory Doctorow
Take "La Schmoove," a song that references "The Jeffersons," "Leave It To Beaver," "Superfly," Honey-Nut Cheerios, Popeye, Elmer's Glue, Elmer Fudd, *Pippi Longstockings*, "Married With Children," "Three's Company," "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," "Do-Wah-Diddy," the board game Battleship, and Pepe Le Pew. It features rhymes like "we in there like swimwear," "Adios muchachos dorme vous unbuckle my Fu-Schnick shoe," and "Yo zilch kaput me nada none son." It's legit bonkers.
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Cory Doctorow
But also: they're *really good*. The frontman, Chip Fu (Roderick Roachford) raps *really* fast, has amazing flow, and periodically just starts rapping *backwards*, like literally saying the same syllables he just said, but backwards, with that same amazing flow. They are steeped in old dancehall, and it shines through (they more-or-less single-handedly revived Tenor Saw's now-familiar "Ring the Alarm").
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Cory Doctorow
Many of their songs feature a kind of hiphopified Phil Spector wall of sound, a kind of melodic drone that underlays the beats and lyrics. As soon as I hear that drone, I start smiling, because I know what's coming.
I have been earwormed by these tracks for this entire century and much of the past century. It's always really hard to explain why you like something.
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Cory Doctorow
I think that Fu-Schnickens' pop culture stream of consciousness and nonsense syllables are a kind of rhythmic version of my own internal monologue which is a kind of endless babble of fragments of books, music, movies and TV; dumb jokes; words repeated until they lose all meaning and become meaningless phonemes, all kind of splinters of ideas and words floating around, bumping into each other.
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Cory Doctorow
There's lots of dancehall and dancehall-adjacent stuff that's arguably better than this album, like "The Good The Bad The Ugly & The Crazy," the amazing and underappreciated collaboration between Necka Demus, Junior Demus and Super Cat:
And I could listen to Shaggy's cover of "Oh Carolina" all day:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtLqmWt2h2g
Or Apache Indian's "Boom Shack-A-Lak":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZzBd41NuZw
Or even better, "Ragamuffin Girl":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGhrpajNtKk
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Cory Doctorow
But none of music is on continuous shuffle-play in the back of my brain the way "F.U. Don't Take It Personal" is and has been since the Clinton administration:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2wD7FbIzGI&list=PLJw--ySHyZNwsmLcxfW3NWTyxQX7mARas
What's more, this is one of the very few (non-Talking Heads, non-David Byrne) albums that my daughter like listening to together in the car. It's so perfectly silly, virtuosic, funny, and danceable.
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Cory Doctorow
Still as good as it was when I was young and had the hips I was born with. I've owned it on cassette and CD and as MP3s. I somehow own the vinyl (though I have no turntable).
I'm grateful to the management of this publication for the opportunity to share it with you.
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Cory Doctorow
*Picks and Shovels* is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton:
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Fitz Bushnell
@pluralistic This was a very fun departure from the usual fare. I will have to check them out, not being at all familiar with them.
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