Pluralistic: Fu-Schnickens (17 Jan 2025)

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Originally published at: Pluralistic: Fu-Schnickens (17 Jan 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow



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The cover of the 1992 Fu-Schnickens album 'F.U. Don't Take It Personal,' featuring the three members of the group looking down into the camera, brownstone buildings visible over their shoulders.

Fu-Schnickens (permalink)

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:

https://www.playderecord.com/

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), and 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. 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. 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

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. 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

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.

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").

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, but 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.

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:

https://www.discogs.com/master/158493-Super-Cat-2-Junior-Cat-Junior-Demus-Nicodemus-The-GoodBadUgly-The-Crazy

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

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. 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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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Picks and Shovels Chapter One https://craphound.com/overclocked/2025/01/10/picks-and-shovels-chapter-one/

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