posted by B on 9/22/01

Best known as: The "I'm Like a Bird" Lady. Last year's recipient of the Captain Redundancy award for achievement in music, with her lyrics "I'm like a bird, I'll only fly away. I don't know where my soul is. I don't know where my home is. And baby all I need for you to know is I'm like a bird. I'll only fly away. I don't know where my soul is. I don't know where my home is. And baby all I need for you to know is I'm like a bird..." At least she's telling the truth -- it's ALL she needs for us to know. If she'd thrown any other lyrics in there we might've gotten confused and changed the channel. Not since Natalie Merchant's "Thank You" (thank you thank you....thank you thank you...THANK YOU THANK YOU...THANK YOU THANK YOU) have words caused less fortunate kids to go into epileptic seizure.

Other atrocities:

- Bringing "scat" back to the mainstream. Sometime a few years ago a gentleman affectionately known as the "Scat Man" had a big hit song where he went "DOO DABBA DABBA DEEEE DOB DO DADDA DA" over and over, between verses proclaiming that he was, contrary to popular opinion, the "Scat Man." This song got big because every one of those "BEST DANCE ALBUMS EVER!!11" or "OMFG THAT'S WHAT I CALL MUSIC" CD's you can buy for 25 dollars on television or 4 dollars at Walmart featured it. There was actually a time when Scat Man was more like a father to us than our own fathers, because of his deep understanding of the human psyche and because of lyrics like "I'm the Scatman....repeat after me, it's a scoobie oobie doobie scoobie doobie melody." In retrospect I'd just rather have my dad beat me with a fucking belt all day than try to figure out those parental advice lyrics.

No matter what Nelly Furtado does or says, she has to stretch out the words to make them fit into the song. So when she says "True" she says "true-woo-woo-woo-woo-woo-woooo-woooo." This mannerism will go alongside Alanis Morisette's hee-haw donkey noise and Steve Perry from Journey's air keyboard as the most ridiculous additions to popular music in recent memory.

Don't stop believin'. In mullets.

- Naming her first album "WHOA NELLY!" As my friend Karla Davis once said, "I actually went out to buy that album, and then I saw that it was called WHOA NELLY and decided not to." I can't wait for her next album, "HI HO SILVER."

Can currently be seen: Trying her best to get a second hit. Currently, when not putting a bag with Madonna's face on it over Britney Spears's head and passing her off as an artist, MTV and VH1 attempt the big sophomore push for Furtado. Her song "Turn Off the Lights" succeeds in not only passing "I'm Like a Bird's" simplicity but it's brain-raping illiteracy as well.

"They say that girl ya know she act too TUFF TUFF TUFF
Well it's till' I turn off the light, turn off the light!
They say that girl you know she act so RUFF RUFF RUFF
Well it's till' I turn off the light, turn off the light!
And I say follow me follow me follow me down down down down till' you see all my dreams!
Not everything in this magical world is quite what it seems!"

First of all, hearing her go "RUFF RUFF RUFF" makes me want to fwack her upside the head with a rolled up newspaper. Secondly, can we NOT think of any better lyrics than "follow me follow me follow me down down down down?" Furtado's like a broken children's record, you have to smack her in the back of the head to get her to keep going. I'd personally like to toss her down down down down into the sewers so I wouldn't have to hear her "scat" anymore.

Thanks a lot, Nelly Furtado. We'd just gotten scat to mean "shit" and you went and messed it all up.

Partners in Crime:

1) The people who keep putting her in neon GAP clothes. She's actually attractive enough (sorta) to pull off some exotic looks, but that gets shot out of aforementioned cannon into aforementioned flaming scabies when she shows up in white pants, pink shirt, and orange jacket. She looks like a freaking snow cone. Or one of those unattractive packs of "HOT NEON CRAYOLA" markers like "ATOMIC TANGERINE" or "DANCING CHINESE URINE YELLOW."

2) She showed up on this year's MTV Video Music Awards to "scat rap" with Missy Elliot. She popped out of a giant Buddha head and danced around in Bill Clinton-thigh white Capri pants. The crowd wasn't cheering, Nelly, they were shielding their eyes from the blinding light of your chicken legs. After all, you're like a bird. A horrible, horrible bird.

We'll only fly away.

The Miss Cleo Call Me Now For Your Free Reading Future Report: I think the physics of Furtado were best explained on our forum. First of all, she's got that racially ambiguous Jessica Alba "everyone accepts me as their own" thing going on, which is fine, because she can walk down most streets in the world without getting assaulted. For guys like me, hell, I'm so white I'm almost transparent...I was walking through Harlem a few weeks ago and a big black guy bashed me over the back of the head with a flapjack.

So she lacks a defined race -- she also has two proven absences in her life:

1) She don't know where her home is (home is). Nelly Furtado is homeless.

2) She don't know where her soul is (soul is). Nelly Furtado is a zombie.

I think it says a lot for the American music business when a raceless, homeless zombie can get a number one hit. The last time that happened was a few years ago with the "Dangerous" album, but then he molested a little boy and that was the end of it. Now he just keeps trying new things (okay, today we're going with one glove...tomorrow we'll try a glove and a shirt with metal dragons on it...ooh, facial hair looks great on me, it looks like pubes in mashed potatoes). It's really sad. Do we want to have Nelly Furtado ending up like this?

Possibly.

But somebody buy her an overcoat, would ya? If she doesn't know where her home is she might get caught out in the rain and catch cold. ACHOO-wo-wo-wo-wo-wo-woooo.

Country Grammar. Kelsey Grammer.

Best known as: The rapper who does to rap music what John Grisham does to literature: sucking out all the good things about it while remaining insanely popular. I can't confess to knowing a whole lot about rap music, but I can take certain things with a grain of salt. Like when Snoop Doggy Dogg means to say "I would like a sandwich" but it comes out like "Izzy and Dizzy went to the Sizzler" I accept it as some rap world code that I'm not supposed to understand. Like when computer guys try to explain why your modem suddenly stopped working...I took my computer to the shop a few weeks ago. The guy said something about my "Ethernet card" and snorted. So I punched him in the mouth. I think he was talking about my Mom.

So yeah, Snoop Dogg can ramble on about "twizzlers" or whatever and get away with it, but when Nelly's "I'm wearing three hats and a dew rag because I'm cool" troglodyte ass saunters up with his clothes on backwards and says crap like "AWW DIRTY YOWN MEAN SON DIRTY RAPRASENT" you can't help but wanna knock the last two or three teeth out of his mouth. I think people of all races should agree on this.

Other atrocities: God, two paragraphs talking about Nelly and I haven't brought up his lyrics yet. Picture toddler Nelly, with his diaper on backward and a paper bag over his head to keep the other children from projectile vomiting walking around the playground with a notepad, jotting down all the stupid schoolyard nursery rhymes and jump rope routines for later use. Flash forward to 2001, where brain damaged people get into large groups (see the "The Special Olympics" or "No Limit Soldiers") and break into recording studios. Here's some of the better Nelly lyrics, as translated by your 8 year old rope jumping cousins:

E.I. --
Andele andele mami, E.I. E.I.
Uh-ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh! What's poppin tonight?
Andele andele mami, E.I. E.I.
Uh-ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh! If the head right, Nelly there ery'night

A bizarre amalgam of Old McDonald, Eddy Guerrero, and Speedy Gonzalez, Nelly manages to break the laws of times and space by completely screwing ebonics up. I bet Ed Lover and Dr. Dre would stare at him like an idiot. And then they'd do the Ed Lover dance!!11 Uh-oooooh! Nelly bought a speak and say. The cow says...MOOOO!! Uh-ooooooh! Time for Tubby Custard, time for Tubby Custard!

Country Grammar --
I'm goin down down baby, yo' street in a Range Rover
Street sweeper baby, cocked ready to let it go
Shimmy shimmy cocoa what? Listen to it pound
Light it up and take a puff, pass it to me now

Shimmy Shimmy Cocoa Puff
Shimmy shimmy pop!
Mama mama sick in bed.
called the doctor and the doctor said
Let's get the rhythm of the head (ding dong)
Lets get the rhythm of the hands (clap clap)
Lets get the rhythm of the feet (stomp stomp)
Lets get the rhythm oh the hot dog
Put em all together and whattaya got?
(ding dong)(clap clap)(stomp stomp) hot dog
Shimmy shimmy Cocoa Puff
Shimmy shimmy POP!

If a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters wrote rap lyrics for a thousand days they would probably stop a few minutes into it and toss their feces at each other. The real question here is if Nelly and the "St. Lunatics" do the same thing. Who am I kidding, they just do patticake all day. "Miss Maaaaaaaryyyyy Mack Mack Mack all dressed in black black black with silver buttons buttons buttons all down her back back back." Who the fuck charges 50 cents (cents cents) to see elephants (elephants elephants) jump a fence (fence fence) in the first place? Even patticake is wrought with capitalism.

Ride Wit Me --
You won't believe how many people, straight doubted the flow
Most said that I was a failure
But now the same motherfuckers askin me fo' dough
And I'm yellin, "I can't help ya"

If nothing else, this proves that Nelly doesn't have any friends.

Can currently be seen: Being "featured" on all sorts of videos (like Jay-Z, or the Dixie Chicks...one or the other) and starring alongside his new friends (presumably the ones who used to think he was a failure, and probably still do behind his back) in the video "Batter Up." Batter Up consists of strippers playing baseball between the rappers singing the Jefferson's theme song. It's so bad that you can't make jokes about it, for fear of losing your mind. Watching "Batter Up" makes me feel like I'm Simon (the Christ figure) starting into the mouth of the beast, looking deeper and deeper into the darkness before it consumes me. Another Lord of the Flies connection I find is that I want to crush Nelly's head with a large rock.

Partners in Crime: The "St. Lunatics," a group of rappers who are so proud to be from St. Louis that they lose control of their motor skills and wear their clothes backwards. It's like they found a tape of that old Kriss Kross Sprite commercial and couldn't figure out why nobody thought it was cool anymore. They look, dress, and act just like Nelly. Their names are Murphy Lee (not Candice Bergen), Ali (who shares the name and the brain damage of the Greatest), Kyjuan (who sounds like he should be tagging with Savio Vega), City Spud (who drew two proper nouns out of a hat...his brother is rapper "Apricot Phonebook") and Slo Down (not the Pokémon).

My favorite St. Lunatic is Bulbasaur!

They are all super cool. Super cool like testicular mutilation. Or flaming scabies.

The Miss Cleo Call Me Now For Your Free Reading Future Report: Nelly has a tattoo on his chest (like Stan) of a heart that looks like it is tearing out of his torso, so either he's a big fan of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or he's doing it just to taunt us. Miss Cleo's prediction for Nelly is that he will continue to sell millions of records until ten years from now, where he and the St. Lunatics will be viewed in the same light as the "Fat Boys." It's a shameful day in rap music when the crusty brown remnants of diarrhea on the ass of talent flake off and fall into good favor.

I say the fish don't fry in the kitchen
Beans don't burn on the grill (that's right)
It took a whole lot of tah-ryin
Just to get up that hill
I said but now we're up in the BIG LEAGUES
My dirty it's our turn at bat
And just as long as we livin, it's Lunatics playa
It ain't nuttin wrong with that, huh - batter up!!

Show me that smile again. (Show me that smile)
Don’t waste another minute on your cryin’.
We're nowhere near the end (nowhere near)
The best is ready to begin.
Fuck The police,
Comin straight from the underground.
Young nigga got it bad cuz I'm brown,
And not the other color so police think,
They have the authority to kill a minority.

Something's...wrong...it's like the birth of a new universe!

.....

Best known as: The hilarious big fat black lady from all things requiring a sassy big fat black lady. She rose to fame as the HILARIOUS yet SASSY maid for some square white people (a police chief and his family, no doubt, the people in charge of our safety) on the show "Gimme a Break!," which lead to so many sassy and hilarious misunderstandings that to this day, some 14 years after the final episode, I am still shaking my head in disbelief at Nell's wacky antics.

She also sang the Gimme a Break! theme song. That's a sure fire classic, especially when she breaks it down near the end. YAY YEAH! The most famous Nell Carter (or Nell Harper, as she appeared on the show) moment occurred during the show's theme song, when she wasn't paying attention to what she was doing and ended up sucking the family fish into a vacuum cleaner. Of all the great moments on the show (and I'm sure there were many great moments, like lessons about shoplifting), that's the one I still remember. I can't even look at a vacuum cleaner now without breaking out into tears. Those fish didn't do anything to you, you rotund demon!

Right click and select "save as" to download the GIMME A BREAK! theme song. "Take me to the riiiiver....drop me in the wateeer...

Other atrocities: Nell Carter's other big television role was as the rotund, sassy principal on "Hangin' With Mr Cooper." Mr. Cooper starred Mark Curry, a comedian who became famous by noticing that white people are different from black people. I never knew how uncool we were until he talked about how we couldn't dance! If I ran a school I wouldn't hire him because of his constant hate preaching towards white people. Yeah, do the dorky white guy voice now, Curry! Enjoy those unemployment checks. Did you ever notice that white people don't eat government cheese? LOL~!!!!11one one

Can currently be seen: At the buffet? I don't know.

Partners in Crime: "Gimme a Break!" (which has the same illogical exclamation point as Chips Ahoy!) was revolutionary because it made fun of white people and fat people at the same time. It is also recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records as the sitcom from the 80's that, if analyzed, has caused the most strife for humanity. Not only did Nell Carter go on to do many depressing things, but the supporting cast all have sprouted like spawns of Lavos around the world.

Thelma Hopkins went on to play "Aunt Rachel" in Family Matters, which made black people just like white people -- completely lame. She was the "concerned" but musical free spirit Aunt and mother to "Little Richie," a kid with an AC Slater haircut. She started a restaurant ("Rachel's Place") and was always dressing up as a showgirl for no apparent reason to make the crowd go "OOOW!!!11" The highlight of Family Matters is of course the episode where they send Urkel into outer space. The kid can't walk across the living room without knocking over a lamp but they can trust him in space? Way to go, America.

Lara Jill Miller, who played Samantha on the show, does the voice for the character "Kari" on Digimon. Digimon is the best cartoon with one static background ever made. Almost as cool as tripping on the stairs and landing on your ass.

"Another good exercise for strength... the pussy toss for distance."

Everybody knows about Joey Lawrence, who used his role as "Joey" on Gimme a Break! to fuel his future roles, like "Joey" on Blossom and "Joey" on Brotherly Love. Joey was the precocious brat with the bowl haircut who was always getting in trouble, but learned a lesson and ended up hugging Nell at the end. The police chief had the parenting skills of bondage gimp so Joey was always getting into things and shooting people.

You might think he was trying to murder Nell, but it's not true. But I do think he, like the rest of us, would love to hear what that fat carcass sounds like being put through a table. Nell could put on a trash bag and grow a blond mohawk. It'd be priceless.

In fact, Gimme a Break! gave us TWO Lawrence Brothers. Matthew Lawrence joined the show in the later seasons. You know anybody who can make "Boy Meets World" WORSE is intimately associated with the occult. And who else joined the show? You guessed it.

OH OH JOEY IS SUCH A CUTIE PATOOTIE!!11 ROSIE ARE PUNNY!!

Rosie O'Donnell played "Maggie O'Brien," who was named that just so Rosie could go "MAGGIE O BRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIAN" in her annoying fathead voice. Then she sang showtunes and shot kooshballs at everybody. I remember an episode where Nell tried to suck Rosie's head up into the vacuum but that was pretty futile.

Other "stars" who appeared on Gimme a Break! Include Jonathan Silverman (from Weekend at Bernie's II, the best dancing treasure hunting zombie movie ever made) and Rosetta Lenoire, or, as she's known in Satanic Circles, Mother Winslow from Family Matters.

How much better would the world have been without Gimme a Break!? I bet you never knew.

Nell also stars Liam Neeson (who is like TAAAY IN THE WEEN) as a concerned man with an ugly, ugly face. Besides looking like one of those square-headed people I like shooting in the ass in Goldeneye for Nintendo 64, he tries to teach Nell how to live in society.

I need to speak to the Jedi Council. The situation has become much more complicated.

There aren't many jokes to make here...just trying to tell you about how the name Nell instantly writes whatever it is associated with off as, you guessed it, retarded. Nell, Nell Carter/Harper, Nelly, and Nelly Furtado have all contributed negatively to our daily lives, and will one day ride the short little yellow bus into cultural obscurity.

Here's my advice: Memorize their names, and throw your head away. Just be careful you don't get one of theirs.

I hear that if you hack Nelly Furtado's limbs off they can grow back. Not only is she like a bird, but she's like a lizard, too.

Shimmy shimmy cocoa pop. I'm closing my eyes now. If I don't write anymore, you know that the madness has consumed me. Hopefully the coast guard will show up and save my friends and I from this deserted island of misery.

“There isn't anyone to help you. Only me. And I'm the Beast... Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!... You knew, didn't you? I'm part of you? Close, close, close! I'm the reason why its no go? Why things are the way they are?”

The beast was harmless and horrible; and the news must reach the others as soon as possible.