Blarney Practice, or I Never Have Just One Thing To Say

[(The following is a reminder to myself that I can expound at length with seeming seriousness about any subject. I need to stay out of long, argumentative discussion in comments threads, and this shows why.)]

[It just occurred to me that, in her hit debut single "Supermodel (You Better Work)," RuPaul declared that she had "just one thing to say." She follows this declaration (warning? reassurance?) with two commands: "You better work," and "Sashay, shantay; shantay, shantay, shantay." (I have yet to confirm that, aside from its ball culture origin, this contained a subtle tribute to the ending of The Waste Land: "shantih, shantih, shantih." I assume pretentious ol' Madonna meant it that way, in part at least, in her absurd, annoying song "Shanti/Ashtangi," but that came years later. I wouldn't put it past our Ru to have done it first and far better, maybe in retaliation for "Vogue.")]

[(In at least one remix, she expands on the imprecation "you better work" by stating "you better work, bitch." But that's just not important; Ru's addressing supermodels here, so "bitch" is understood, and we're talking about the 7" anyway, of course, which, yes, I did buy on cassette single when it was released in early 1993 after seeing the video at Rage in West Hollywood with - probably - Rafe and Sean, and maybe Max, Dave M., and/or Tom. Rafe bought on CD the album and the three singles Tommy Boy optimistically released, and he used to do my hair in the bathroom in that dumpy apartment in Isla Vista to those songs; good times, and if some members of Santa Barbara's gay community called us "the Mohawk Twins" for a while, it wasn't RuPaul's fault.)]

[The question that came to me this morning is this: if she says she "has one thing to say," which is it? Now, the title of the song is what it is (how did that custom of including a parenthetical word or phrase in song titles get started, anyway?), and one could respond that "you better work" and "sashay, shantay; shantay, shantay, shantay" is the one thing she, indivisbly, has to say (the second clause defining the first), and that she separated them by repeating the introductory declaration (warning?) for perfectly valid artistic reasons. (The subsequent advice to "turn to the left; now turn to the right" I don't see as problematic, either, nor phrases like "do your thing and make love to the camera," since she didn't precede those with "I have one thing to say.")]

[Still, it's confusing. I think RuPaul has had a pretty interesting time of it in the public eye for herself and for us, and I'm a fan, but is it possible that she hasn't had as tremendously prolific and remunerative a career strictly as a recording artist as she (and her various record labels) might have hoped because of these kinds of mixed lyrical messages? I hope she reads this and thinks about it. Then again, if it only occurred to me fourteen years after the song's release, maybe I'm worrying too much.]

[(I know you're wondering how I know that's the correct spelling of "shantay." After all, it could be spelled like any of the six forms of the French word for "sing" that I can recall that sound like that, and it is a song, after all - or it could be spelled any other way RuPaul wants to spell it. Sadly, my very cursory search for the lyrics when doing research for this post were fruitless. For me, "shantay" fits. Even inserting the semicolon as I did above is taking a lot upon myself.)]

[Which reminds me: Chris (now of Guerneville (actually, he lives in a separate unincorporated area nearby called Guernewood Park by a few disinterested but punctilious souls like me, and by the people who live there (some of them), realtors, and maybe the Sonoma County Public Works Department signage guys (who I have reason to know are great, or were great when I was doing my Eagle Scout service project in 1986); since Guerneville's not even incorporated, it seems silly to say Chris and his lovely husband Mark live outside its limits, but I guess they do: the town ends pretty abruptly at that one creek there by what used to Fife's), Chris, on one of our '93 trips from Santa Barbara to WeHo wrote our party's name in at the hostess stand at the IHOP (I first wrote that as "iHop"; goddamn Apple Computer all to hell!), there at Santa Monica Boulevard and...is/was it Holloway? La Cienega? ... when we felt the need for post-barhopping sustenance as..."Shantay.")]

[(Maybe you had to be there, and drunk, and gay, and in your early/mid-20s, but we five white boys thought it was hilarious when "Shantay, party of five" was announced over the loudspeaker. God bless us drunken nellie queens-in-training.)]

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