It was extraordinary how the public had changed. They had become very blasé about entertainment. Whereas American used to arrange to spend an evening in the theatre for a treat, now they seemed to go to the theater just to kill time. With the newspapers and motion-picture magazines telling the public the private lives of stars, a lot of the illusion and glamor (sic) of the stage were gone . . . The theaters were full of children. At the first two shows in the afternoon the house would be full of boys and girls, slumped down in their seats, obviously bored with the acts and only waiting for the picture to come on. Kids and necking couples . . . By the time of the last show, at 9:30 PM, when you had your best audience, you were dead tired. Too tired to care whether they liked you or not. - Tucker, Some of These Days (No publisher credited, 1945), pp. 261-262.
In another example of Dumile's pen prowess, he teams up with former Anti-Pop Consortium rhymesayer M. Saayid for a cartoonish recollection of their education ("Never Dead"). Doom claims, "If I don't study, I'ma cheat off Peter Parker," and then teams up with schoolmate Saayid to run and gun on a search for Doom's stolen Donkey Kong game. Throughout the course of the song, they buy fireworks and indulge in Guyanese strippers in Chinatown, and Doom finds a guru who teaches him "that the roach is never dead," hypothetically cultivating the future super scientist on which this album is based. Songwriting doesn't often come this lush, detail-minded or captivating in hip-hop these days, but it's no surprise that the best songs in the genre are coming from an 80s transplant that claims to be "a really big fan of Dan Aykroyd."
The Vauville Dead
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