Friday, May 09, 2008

Give me the shaft

There are any number of reasons to love "Shaft," the Oscar-winning theme song for the 1971 blaxploitation movie of the same name.

1. There's the lyrics:

Who's the black private dick that's a sex machine to all the chicks?

2. There's the jump suit Isaac Hayes is wearing in this full-length slo-mo performance of the song:



3. There's the fact that "Shaft" has been covered by a ukulele ocrchestra.

... And now for a glimpse into the incredible Eriness of Being ...

4. Listening to "Shaft" the other day, it ocurred to me that today's pop music has all but lost the instrumentals that gave "Shaft" it's energy. You can't get that visceral animal thrust from a goddamn canned electronic loop. And that, dear readers, is how I came up with the idea for this FREEBLOG entry.

5. Happy Friday.

11 comments:

Velvet Fog said...

Hey! That was our very own 'Garrett' in that Ukulele band.
Which is fantastic by the way. I might like that better than the original.

That was, until they started talking...ouch. That's gonna leave a mark.

PDD said...

Man, Mariah Carrey is just as bad as David Hasselhoff these days. Did you see her latest video of "touch my body?" Seriously Erin, it's just as bad as "Jump Into My Car" from the Hoff.

I regard this guy as a musical genius: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UAWqwLjN70

You would have totally loved to have me as your daughter in the '90's. Or maybe not...

Anonymous said...

Ok, Leave the fucking Hoff out of this PDD. The good news about having a tween is Sponge Bob. The bad, well...(for the record, 10yo daughter)

RJ

Anonymous said...

You're damn right.

Can you dig it?

Amy L. Hanna said...

I dig 70's soul, but I don't dig the alien apostrophe in item #4.
Tssssk!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Loved the humorous ukulele rendition of the tune. Somewhere Don Ho (or even Tiny Tim) is smiling, and maybe even clapping along.

Erin O'Brien said...

Okay Hanna, now that you've drawn attention to the mother effer apostrophe in #4, I've got to leave it in!

Hal said...

Being the NFL Films geek that I am, I recognized that a classic NFL Films track entitled "The game that got away," owes a lot to the theme from Shaft. Click here and then listen to sample #11 to see what I mean.

Diane Vogel Ferri said...

I constantly mourn the loss of good music in this the - what are we calling this decade anyway? the zeros?
I've never done this before but I TAGGED you on my blog - mostly these blogs things are silly but I liked this one about a favorite book. You can ignore it if you want.

Diane Vogel Ferri said...

I constantly mourn the loss of good music in this the - what are we calling this decade anyway? the zeros?
I've never done this before but I TAGGED you on my blog - mostly these blogs things are silly but I liked this one about a favorite book. You can ignore it if you want.

Norm said...

This decade is the "oughts."

As in, "I ought not have done so many drugs in the last decade."

And man, Isaac Hayes was cool back then. I'm sorry the scientologists got hold of him.

Anonymous said...

He morphed into "chef" for me a loooong time ago. (feckin' scientologists)