Toppa Top 10: Ten More Fake Reggae Tunes + Faux-hall Parodies

Words by Jesse Serwer—

As our original Fake Reggae Toppa Top 10—featuring the likes of Ras Trent, Mr. Ugly Man and Eddie Murphy’s “Kill the White People”—made abundantly clear, there’s been no shortage of hilarious spoofs of reggae and dancehall over the years. You could say that few music styles lend themselves more easily to parody—whatever “Gangnam Style” is excepted. We decided it was time for a rundown of all of the best fake reggae and faux-hall spoofs that we missed that first time, plus some new ones that have popped up since then. Pull up a chair, roll up something or other, and try not to laugh too hard.

10. Konfu Dread and Kiss Kiss, “Who Di Girls Dem Want”

Konfu Dread is a web series directed by Simon Thompson (aka Yosef Imagination), a young director behind some of the more humorous videos to come out of Jamaica recently. It was only right that Konfu, whose adventures include taking on bleachers and beating up Diplo, got a video of his own then. Though perhaps not as laugh-out-loud funny as we’d have imagined, “Who Di Girls Dem Want” pairs our hero with a Japanese love interest named Kiss Kiss, to certifiably amusing results.

9. Prince Paul (feat. Mr. Dead and Newkirk), “Boston Top”


[audio:http://largeup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/12-The-Boston-Top.mp3|titles=12 The Boston Top]

Prince Paul is a producer known for, among other things, inventing the hip-hop skit (with De La Soul’s 1989 debut, 3 Feet High and Rising), and his solo LPs, which include the original hip-hop opera Prince Among Thieves, tend to be more notable for their comedy than their musicality. Among the “cases” on 2005’s itsTRUmental, a parody of Law and Order-style cop shows, was “Boston Top,” a song, Paul told me in a 2005 interview for XLR8R, that was inspired by a “true story of buying a Boston cream donut where the icing came off like a magic shell in one piece.” It’s not clear why Paul (or, more specifically, guest vocalists Mr. Dead and Newkirk) decided to relate this story in patois over a dancehall riddim, but with lines like “Oh lawwwdd…another cream is dying,” we’re glad they did.

8. Trever Off Key, “Fake Jeans Admit It”

Trever Off-Key has been called “the Weird Al Yankovic of dancehall” (by us, actually), so we’re not quite sure why “Fake Jeans Admit It,” his send-up of Vybz Kartel’s “Straight Jeans and Fitted,” didn’t make it onto our first Top 10. It’s certainly on point. Other artists to get the Off-Key treatment include Demarco and Drake, whose “Find Your Love” became a different kind of love song in “Miss My Cooking.”

7. 10cc, “Dreadlock Holiday”

Not a parody in the purest sense, “Dreadlock Holiday” could probably be the basis for another Top 10 post on weird, random forays by rock bands into reggae. The sly British art rock band 10cc’s “Dreadlock Holdiday” was done in a “post-modern ironic style,” as the narration at the end of this Top of the Pops clip (which is unfortunately un-embedable) puts it, spoofing outsider notions of Jamaica while also, in a way, embodying them. While the song’s lyrics (in which a tourist narrator is accosted by a Jamaican thug who tries to relieve him of his chain) have their questionable aspects, anyone who doubts that the words “I don’t like Jamaica…I love it!” come from a sincere place should probably rent the movie, The Lunatic. The beloved yardie comedy starring Paul Campbell was directed by none other than 10cc guitarist Lol Creme. And, yes, his name really is Lol Creme.

6./5. Uzimon, “Ganja Fix Everything”/”Steven Seagal”

Listen to enough reggae, and you might start to believe that the cure for all the world’s ills can be found in a ganja pipe. On “Ganja Fix Everything,” Uzimon—a white deejay who looks like Yellowman, sounds like Collie Buddz and perpetrates like Snow—takes this premise to the extreme. Proffering sensi as a cure for everything from mental retardation to rickets, the video finds Uzi passing joints around an operating room like a character out of Adult Swim’s Children’s Hospital, miraculously curing a cancer-stricken patient. His 2011 LP Pussy Weapon is filled with (hear some of the tunes from that album in the EPK below, or stream the LP right here) similar fare, but his masterstroke is surely “Steven Seagal,” an ode to the ultimate reggae-loving Babylonian— on the Sleng Teng riddim, no less. The video for “Champion Sound” is pretty damn funny too, though the rapper dude cameo kinda brings the song down. Watch it below (after the EPK), and decide for yourself.

4. Sani Showbizz, “Big Piece Of Chicken”

Sani Showbizz, a send-up of early ’80’s dancehall chatters (think Eek-A-Mouse’s flow with Barrington Levy’s clothes) inhabited by Jamaican producer/comedian Asani Morris (the same guy behind Prince Zimboo, of Major Lazer fame), made it onto our first Fake Reggae Toppa Top 10 with his “I Know,” but he’s outdone himself with his just-released “Big Piece of Chicken” video. A do-for-yourself themed motivational anthem (“If you ask me for something/And I give you chicken wing/No need to get upset because a breast you didn’t get,” “Work for what you want so you seed and grow your own plant/Don’t be a freakin’ leech”) informed by Jamaica’s obsession with “Kentucky,” (or, as Americans now know it, KFC), “Big Piece” is a hilarious 2012 answer to Tiger’s “No Wanga Gut.”

3. Rasta Oliver, “My Likkle Donna”

Decades before Ras Trent, Oliver Samuels, Jamaica’s most beloved comedian, played TV’s original rasta imposter on an episode of his classic ’80s sitcom, Oliver. In the aptly titled “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” episode, Samuels’ buffonish con man pretends to be a righteous Ras who performs “strictly conscious lyrics, I-man doesn’t deal with slackness,” as part of an elaborate ruse to get his girlfriend Donna a plane ticket to the U.S. Urged to perform for her skeptical parents at a dinner party, all he has to offer is this thin imitation of ’80s dancehall star Tiger’s style.

2. Weird Al Yankovic, “Buy Me a Condo”

From 1984’s 3-D, the same album that gave us the classic “Eat It,” this early “Weird” Al gem is told from the point of view of a Ras making the transition from yard life to a yuppified existence in a condo, complete with a Cusinart, a “T-shirt with the alligator on,” and  Jackson Browne records. “Gonna cut off mi dreadlocks, throw away all mi ganja, I’ll have a tupperware party, maybe join me a health spa...”

1. The Beastie Boys, “Beastie Revolution”

One of the goofiest tracks they ever recorded—and that’s saying something—“Beastie Revolution” is off of MCA, Ad Rock and Mike D.’s second release, a three-song EP called Cookie Puss, the title track of which is a song prank calling a Carvel. “Beastie Revolution” has nods to Sister Nancy’s “One, two, operator dat ah you” and Black Uhuru’s “Party In Session” (with the slide whistle riffs). It’s also most likely the first American record to include the phrase, “Ya blind ya bloodclat, fire bun ya” and definitely the only reggae song about a fictional Chinese restaurant. Bim!

Honorebel Mention: Jimmy Fallon and the Ragtime Gals, “Sweat (A La La La Long)”

On a recent episode of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, the host made good on an audience request for a hybrid of reggae music and barbershop quartets, covering Inner Circle’s “Sweat (A La La La Long)” with his red, gold and green blazer-sporting Vaudevillian crew, the Ragtime Gals.