Wad o' Funk - special guest column by Ben Snakepit!

Hey gang!  I'm calling in sick this week.  Take it away, Ben.

When I started art school in 1992, there was a guy in a bunch of my classes named Derrick. Derrick had his own style. He was into hip-hop, but he was no gangster. Derrick was old-school, and "down with P-Funk". He would show up to class in red overalls, airbushed with cryptic phrases like "It's the Wad" and "Sir Nose". Sometimes he would wear a compact disc on a chain around his neck. He was a nice enough guy, and after a few weeks we became friends.
One day, he came into class with a boom box and played me his demo tape. He played "She Dropped That Bomb on Me", lip-synching along with a complete choreographed dance routine to go with it. He told me all about his group, Wad-O-Funk. He was "The Wad" (his Name was Derrick A. Walker, his initials backwards spelled "wad') and supposedly had three other members to his group: G-Snap, MC Database, and Sir Funk-A-Nose. Later I learned that they were all just Derrick. He had paid $1000 to have this three-song demo tape made in a recording studio. I asked him for a copy of the tape and he said no. After bugging him for weeks, he finally dubbed me a copy, which I immediately copied for all of my friends, and within a month everyone in Johnson Hall (our dorm) was reciting the lyrics to "Milk It". I asked Derrick if he'd like to play a show with my band, but he had bigger plans. "Naw man, I don't wanna do my first concert in no small place like the Metro, I wanna start off at the Coliseum." The Metro was a 300-capacity venue where punk bands played. The Coliseum was a huge event center where I saw Kiss and Ted Nugent play. Derrick also told me of his plan to achieve stardom. First he had to wait for his cousin to return from Korea with some "sound equipment", which was apparently much cheaper over there. Next, he was going to watch the then-upcoming film CB4, to get some tips on how to make it big in the industry. This would give him the advantages he needed to become a big star, he believed.
Derrick never had any idea how many people liked his tape. He also had no idea that we didn't really like his tape for the reasons he wanted people to like it. Derrick was oblivious to a lot of things. On the first day of our Women's Studies class (Derrick and I were the only two men there), he told the professor that he was taking the class "to figure out why y'all womens is so crazy." Not everyone was a fan of his demo, though. Some of his critics called the beats "cheesier than a Casio", and others referred to him as a "sucka MC". This may be true, but to this day I can still recite every word to every song by heart. I lost touch with Derrick after college. He never got to play the Collisseum, or even the Metro. I don't know if he ever wrote or recorded any music besides these two and a half songs. Honestly, I don't care. This demo is enough. So get prepared, sit back and relax; as we depart from the inner city... Venus, that is.

 01 Introduction
 02 She Dropped That Bomb on Me
03 Milk It