For decades, the tune Turkey in the Straw has attracted millions of kids to flock around the neighborhood ice cream truck. However, Good Humor has announced they are replacing it with a new composition by RZA of the Wu-Tang clan because of the former song’s past racist connotations.
The company says
You can hear the new jingle here.
Damn. Now I have to get rid of my Murphy’s Oil Soap.
Well I’ll be damned. That’s pretty cool!
I had a truck come through my neighborhood twice this week. No “turkey in the straw.” I’ll have to keep my ears pealed for the new RZA joint lol
Wasn’t Wu-Tang Clan famous for songs with misogynistic lyrics?
So, Turkey in the Straw is racist now. Great. Even though the song is about the problems hauling stuff with horse and wagon, and doesn’t even mention race at all, it doesn’t matter. Some old timey performers used the melody for jim crow parodies, and the song is tainted forever, right? Even though nobody alive remembers the racist parodies. But most folk aficionados who know the original lyrics will be racist shitheads if they dare to sing the words quietly to themselves. Folk aficionados like myself.
Fuck it. I’m going to sing Rose of Alabamy whenever possible from now on. Screw you if you don’t like it.
So incredibly, profoundly stupid. “The song didn’t start off racist, and the period when it was used by racists is obscure and mostly forgotten, but we are going to dig that obsolete usage up again for Performative Wokeness!” We are truly living in an Idiocracy.
The new jingle is forgettable glurge too.
Good Humor isn’t replacing anything, since they don’t operate ice cream trucks. They commissioned a new song and the operators of the trucks can decide for themselves what music to play. They can stick with the old, use this new one, use something else altogether.
Capitalism is once again working as intended.
Fine. Get a new jingle. But don’t pointlessly insult a well loved traditional tune doing it.
actually, around here people use bootlegged music from video games these days on their trunks …
The blurb on their website seems pretty even-handed. They acknowledge that the tune’s original European roots have no racist connotations and that its legacy is richer than those particular lyrics.
Or is it insulting to mention it at all? Is this one of those things that we should pretend never happened?
I’ve heard Joplin’s, “The Entertainer,” played from IC trucks [is that next to get yanked?].
My fave was in, “Maximum Overdrive,” when the driverless ICT played, “King of the Road,” (A big, bloody dent was on the hood of the truck near one of the headlights.). Very apropos.
I don’t know. Should we pretend rap songs about “stables full of bitches and ho’s” never happened?
I feel like you’re implying something, but maybe you’d care to say it directly?
That poor tune. Won’t someone please think of the tunes. Tunes are people too.
If they themselves acknowledge that most people don’t know it and will be surprised to learn it? Yes. Let sleeping dogs lie. They are ripping open a healed scar and expecting us to thank them for then handing over a band-aid.
How is that possible? Songs aren’t people and thus don’t have feelings. The only insults would be towards people who like the song. But, despite your claim to the contrary, such insults were never issued.
The only thing the video covered is the 100% true history of the song. While the melody was not written to be racist, it came to America via the minstrel shows with the current lyrics. It thus has a history of being sung to make fun of black people.
You may not remember it, but I guarantee you that black people’s memory of racist shit isn’t so short, any more than they forgot the reason why the Confederate flag was flown, or why “states rights” started being a thing.
It’s fine that you still like the song. No one told you to stop listening to it or stop liking it. The only argument being made is that a song with that history is not an appropriate song for an ice cream truck, and that you might want to replace it with their song instead. Or not–it’s up to the individual ice cream truck owners. Just like it’s up to you whether you listen to the song. I wish people would stop taking change so personally.
If only the replacement was better. I don’t hear it as glurgy–i.e. sickly sweet but without substance–but I don’t think it’s very good. It lacks a catchy melody and is very sleepy sounding. It sound more like the backing to a rap track than something that will get caught in kids’ heads to tell them ice cream is here.
I suspect their thoughts may have stopped at “hire a black musician” without regard to whether they were good at making catchy jingles. Though, I admit, I’m not that familiar with the artist’s work.
But I’m not into much current music in general. I’m not the type who just puts some music on. Still, I suspect some trucks may not change simply because they don’t like the proposed replacement.
Should we be passing judgment on songs of the distant past for their racism, when modern songs that are paeans to misogyny and homophobia are lauded as works of art?
? Who is proposing that ice cream trucks should play rap songs about “bitches and hos” or other “paeans to misogyny and homophobia”?
Oh wait, nobody is. You’re grasping at a strawman comparison to try to claim that there’s somehow something hypocritical about the Good Humor company making a reasonable and factual acknowledgement of the racist history of an old-time popular song.
We can dislike misogynistic rap songs for their misogynistic lyrics, and dislike the traditional association of the “Turkey in the Straw” tune with racist lyrics like “N----r Love a Watermelon, Ha! Ha! Ha!” and “O ole Zip Coon he is a larned skolar”.
I mean, I like the old non-racist [i]“Went out to milk and I didn’t know how” lyrics to “Turkey in the Straw” too, but I don’t demand that everybody else has to pretend that the racist versions didn’t exist or aren’t distasteful.
All it will take is for one idiot to write racist lyrics to the new tune, and then that will also be unusable.