PUBLIC ENEMY – ARSE WALK WITH ME
There are a number of glaring problems with Public Enemy, not the least that Elvis actually wasn’t really a hero to anyone. I can certainly remember being five and saying “Mummy, when I grow up I want to lose any semblance of talent I might have had, get fat and die on the toilet“. But it would be churlish to criticise the obviously dyslexia Flavor Flav for his misreading of the machine-gun name Glock. Though perhaps he should not have constantly brought the fact that his small weapons compliment consisted of a timepieces best suited to School Exams. And I should not really bring up the fact that their ground-breaking scratcher was a wee bit pre-emptive naming himself after the tenth film in the Terminator franchise. I think Arnie might be a bit old by then. Oft credited with the creation of an apocalyptic soundscape to back many P.E. songs, it was clear that Terminator X was a big fan of T.S.Eliot and the whimper style of world ending. No, all these things are pretty much by the by: though it came as no surprise when Professor Griff left and rejoined his old sparring partner Mel Smith for a number of piss-poor sketch shows.
No, all I have to bring up is the strange phenomenon of Bum Rushing. Again when I was five we used to play this game which involved sitting down and trying to walk across the room using only our arses. You can swivel the body and maybe get each cheek about three inches in front of the last one. A happy hour can then be wasted racing across the room. We called it bottie crawling, later arse walking. Chuck D calls it Bum Rushing. Don’t get me wrong, I daresay Mr D (father of Baby?) is an accomplished Arse Walker – he walks the walk and talks the talk after all. Nevertheless even the fastest derriere in the west is not going to muster more than one mile a day. And you will be straining badly. So really the epithet Bum Rushing is a little bit generous.
Mind you, I would have loved to have seen a hard New York hip-hop crowd all twitching across the city on their backsides, Bum Rushing A Public Enemy Show. The only other time that many people could be found on their arses would be during an Indie Disco in 1991. At least the PE fans were going somewhere. The James fans Sitting Down in their long sleeved floppy T-Shirts which said Sit Down on them were going nowhere. Much like James.