Misirlou - Egyptian Girl

I was forced to wake up early this morning. I was in the room during a television airing of "Ellen", Ellen DeGeneres' daytime talk show. The Black-Eyed Peas performed on the show. I once saw the Black-Eyed Peas live in the late 90's, and they were a fairly legitimate hip-hop act. They were not the act that i had been there to see, but I was impressed enough to talk them up for a while. It's rather interesting what success does in some cases. In the late nineties they were a pretty good act - relatively imaginitive beats, some decent rapping, and a female lead vocalist with an amazing voice. Today, in 2009, the Black-Eyed Peas looked every bit the part of a fraudulent exercise. They've since parted ways with their original female vocalist, the circumstances of which are unknown to me. Her replacement, the one they call Fergie, seems to be about as useful a human being as Carmen Electra, which-in case you are wondering-is not very useful at all. This group has sold tens of millions of records, and yet their beats lack imagination, they do not rap or sing, but rather yell inane things about starting parties, done over already over-used samples. The sample that caught my attention today was a chopped up version of the surf-rock standard "Misirlou" by Dick Dale and the Del-Tones. If you have seen the movie "Pulp Fiction", you probably recognize it as one of he many stand-out songs from the soundtrack. I started youtube-ing, and wiki-ing and all sorts of internet what-nots, and was surprised to find that the song has a long multicultural history. Reputedly first performed by Michalis Patrinos' rebetiko style band in Greece cerca 1927, the song also has been connected with Jewish weddings, middle-eastern belly-dancing, orchestral arrangements, and of course, surf-rock. My journey began today with a viewing/listening of a live recording of the song by Dick Dale and the Del-tones in 1963. I have a peculiar fondness of reading Youtube comments. If you find stupidity entertaining, as I do, your chances of finding some entertaining textual comments are far greater at youtube.com than just about anywhere else. Naturally, a proud Greek man and [presumably]a bored white kid from somewhere in America got into a cultural argument. There is no need to go into any of the derisive things that were said by the clueless guy wasting the time of one who was simply expressing his pride in his nation's culture. The last comment I read, from the man of Greece, was the inspiration for this writing:

"You are not a nation, you are just people. You dont have history, you just have recent memories, Im sorry. Try to open a book smartass. Yea my mother may have mustache but she didnt get pregnant on 18 by a truck driver whose name cannot even remember, just like yours. Im sorry once again."

I thought to myself that he's not wrong. I thought of the Black-Eyed Peas, and the circle was complete.