Greatest Album of All Time of the Week: Foxy Shazam!

Theme: Everything Louder Than Everything Else - Meat Loaf

Pre-hash-tag-me-too album art be liek

Cultural appropriation is a good way to make interesting and engaging art, nowhere moreso than in the field of music: blacks culturally appropriated instruments like the guitar, piano, trumpet, saxophone and double bass from whites and used them to make blues, jazz and rock & roll. Whites then reappropriated and improved rock by stripping out the roll, refining it into more potent forms like heavy metal, punk and shoegaze. Mongolians then appropriated metal and combined it with their own traditional instruments and throat singing, and so on.

In a similar way, Foxy Shazam elevated soul music by combining it with emo, which sounds like putting sardines in your ice cream but it actually worked, but not content to mog blacks at their own game, flamboyant frontman Eric Nally also mogged gays by imbuing the resultant concoction with Queen-tier histrionic camp. Lead single "Wannabe Angel" drops the most incongruously unintentionally Gigachad-meme lyric I can recall: "and all you hipsters say I'm gay/Well I'm not gay at all". In fact, Nally even culturally appropriated Freddy Mercury's moustache, to add insult to AIDS. I MEAN-

Don't get me wrong, this band is not based even slightly: one track from their first album, Introducing..., literally features the lyric "I wanna be black", placing them in the same boat as poor Eminem, who found to his embarrassment that he kept outcompeting the black rappers whose shtick he had stolen (yeah, I'm sure there were plenty who were better than him, but not that made it into heavy MTV rotation). Self-h8ing lib entertainers endowed with straight white excellence not quite sure whether they're allowed to cut loose with their egos might not be a common dilemma, but it's given good schadenfreude both times. But if blacks and gays want izzat satisfaction, they can GIT GUD. Whitebois don't crie because Mongols currently rule metaldom; they earned it, and it's up to us to take back the crown anytime we feel like ditching the fedoracore and getting back to trad/true/NWOBHM basics.

So celebrate, don't seethe, as Nally sings "Connect" over a beatboxed backing track and blows away Queen anthems with the likes of "Unstoppable". Their next album reined in the excess and was rubbish, and they never made the big time. I have no idea what became of them since then, and less doubt that they bent the knee to some variety of panopticon-mandated poz in the dreary decades that have followed, but for a shining moment they schooled all their betters on the commie social totem pole, and that, beside the madcap choons themselves, will always make me smile.