Rule, Britania, Britania Rules the Waves (And to Hell with Third World Knaves)
Whenever hip hop sits on your stomach like poorly cooked pork swimming in buttermilk, this is the perfect antidote:
By
David Gottfried
I live on West 34th Street in Midtown Manhattan. My environs sometimes remind me of a Lou Reed lyric from “Coney Island Baby”: “Just remember that the City is a funny place/Sort of like a circus or a sewer.”
34th Street has little of the circus that Reed was referring to. But it is awash in the sewer. I am not referring to stuff such as raw sewage. I am thinking of the people. They are so disagreeable, their vulgar and garish behavior so much in accord with the ambience of a filthy town in the sweltering tropics, that I feel that I have descended under Manhattan’s streets and into the Hades of the rat-infested sewers.
When I come home, I must shout my defiance of their gaudy culture by blasting songs of Britain. Either hard rock, or dreamy stuff like “A Whiter Shade of Pale” (A song that is the gorgeous and veritable antithesis of the Weathergirls, Hip Hop, etc. etc.) or Heroic British Anthems that make me think of Churchill. This old poem of mine exemplifies my conviction that England may be at the very top of the heap:
English, English Where Art Thou
by
David Gottfried
I want to hear the sparkling sound
of English speech going round
The sharp and caustic consonants
The logic cutting Continents
But will I hear the vulgar sounds
From ugly, swarthy, southern grounds
The slurping, gurgling gross illogic
The third world dull and idiotic
Their meager tiny ideation
Their gaudy garish conversation
Their robes, their veils, that turbaned head
Oh, give me Saville Row instead
Damn your maddening, malarial politics
I need quinine, gin and tonics
No spicy, ulcerating Vindaloo
Make it a steak, potatoes and brew
No witchcraft, voodoo or sophistry
Just modern science and industry
Take your herbs and acupuncture
Or soon I'll need a lumbar puncture
No febrile Farrakhan or Khomeini
Over Churchill and Disraeli
Damn drums of rhythmic stupification
Against melodic variation
Brains and beauty they always eschew
They always want to kill the Jew
Quash the masochistic tendency
To welcome the foe's ascendancy
Oh give me Shakespeare, give me Cromwell
Be off, you multi-cultural spell