Barney Rubble Co-Opts Black Musician Culture To Steal Breakfast Cereal
In 1955, Pat Boone’s first Billboard number-one single was a constipated white-bread cover of Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That A Shame.” (True legend: Boone’s producers talked him out of titling his version “Isn’t That A Shame” in his unremitting disgust for Domino’s improper grammar.) The man’s career flourished as southern Pentecostals instantly preferred his Baptist covers of blues-shouts 45’s by the likes of Little Richard, Big Joe Turner, and Nat King Cole; many of Boone’s versions even outsold the originals. But one or two things have changed in our cultural landscape since the mid-50’s: these days Boone continues to fume at young musicians’ disrespect for George W. Bush, while many of the rest of us are welcoming our first African-American major-party Presidential candidate in our nation’s history. Isn’t that a shame, Pat?
It would be easy to dismiss Boone’s 1950’s cultural dominance as primitive. Unfortunately, there has been a thief of more contemporary black American musicianship; someone almost as square and pasty as Boone, but more primitive still. To his credit, of course, he’s an animated caveman … not interested so much in Billboard chart dominance as he is in dazzling his next-door neighbor with the mystic allure of black artists’ pop-cultural awesomeness long enough to steal a bowl of Fruity and/or Cocoa Pebbles and running off into the sunset.
In his pursuit of Fred Flintstone’s all-too-attainable breakfast, Barney Rubble occasionally imitated white artists as well; he once notably crooned out a raspy number as pompadoured blue-collar hero “Rock Rockstone,” and on another occasion he sported a multicolored Mohawk and pogo’d around Fred’s breakfast table snarling “Shake it shake it shake it, shake it in your bowl” in an anarchic Cockney accent while Dino accompanied him on a stone-age keytar (this is true). But here are three major examples in which Barney’s cereal jones takes things to an arguably more racist level.
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