| Toothpick |
| Time Traveling Couch |
| Chances are, if you’ve seen the fast food nation documentary Super Size Me by Morgan Spurlock, the only time you’ll forget it is if the wind changes direction just right and the smell of fries comes wafting in your general direction. Mmm … fries …
No! A searing, if showy, indictment of all that the term fast food means, the documentary also used an entertaining blend of visual tricks and quirky music to make the message go down easy. The theme song, also titled “Super Size Me,” used a similar obvious-but-don’t-you-forget-it style with a rap concerning “big boys, big girls with real big thighs” set to a quirky television commercial backing track. The song, by Toothpick, also closes the rap-folkie (rolkie? frapper?) blendmaster’s album, Time Traveling Couch. What comes before continues a unique blend of deep-voiced raps, some psychedelic imagery and snippets of guitar hooks perfect for Saturday afternoons in the frat house when Ludacris exacerbates the headache and there are no girls around to convince you like John Mayer. Toothpick, formerly of a band seldom heard of called Bad Ronald, stridently pumps out the types of rhymes that make their way into high school yearbooks. If nothing else, he should be praised for avoiding rap couplets tiredly involving feminine features and nightclub creatures (Gah! It’s contagious!). This is evident in the title track: “I wanna see Adam West, Michael Knight and Bruce Banner, and smoke Cuban cigars with Fidel in Havana/ I wanna play yesterday’s Lotto so ring the bell, and tell Baby Jessica’s parents she’s in the well.” The sparse instrumentation and lack of Neptunes bleeps and whirls give off a weird Beck/Butthole Surfers/Pharcyde amalgam vibe, letting the words do most of the weird walking. With a deep, steady voice easily compared to Everlast (“What It’s Like”), a song like “The High Life” draws comparisons to the self-conscious “Because I Got High” by Afroman. For anyone who gets beyond the chorus, the lead character goes from “selling Blow Pops to blow” and regret seeps in like the smell of smoke into furniture. The message feels real without a word of sermon, but we’re still relying on people getting beyond the chorus … For now, Toothpick chooses his spots to put a little tune in his voice. One definitely could see his next album featuring a Ja Rule special as its first single with some sweet-voiced siren providing the hook. That the first album doesn’t feature such a track proves quite refreshing and filling, and not something you’ll find in Everytown, U.S.A. |
| Originally published in The MidWeek, as written by Hank Brockett |