Recently, while at a theater waiting for a movie to start I was treated to a confusing animated short film that had no words and involved farm animals.  The film, which ended up being an advertisement for Chipotle, was accompanied by a mediocre(er) recording of a mediocre song “The Scientist”, by Coldplay.  The friend who’d joined me for the movie was so thrilled with this version that he pulled out his iPhone, accessed an “app” and determined that the cover was being played by Willie Nelson, and downloaded the awful version of the song for a mere $1.29, all before the two-minute film ended.

This experience reminded me that today’s instant-access technology is bad for people who like to buy things and can’t afford them and that I like Chipotle more than I like Coldplay and that I like just about anything more than Willie Nelson, but it also caused me to think back to 1992, when I went through an intense three-week process that involved four miles of walking, $15.95 and seven conversations with a guy who smelled like wheat germ in order to obtain the cassette of the Fu-Shnikens.

The Fu-Shnikens, for those who have forgotten, were a rap trio most famous for their names Chip Fu, Moc Fu and Poc Fu and the glut of moderately annoying hip hop songs they produced containing frequent use of the sound “Fu”.  Their most famous song is undoubtedly “True Fuschnick” which sounded like a Yiddish term for an annoying child, but which was actually a song that contained the lyrics “When the mic is gripped, in ridobidobip bip da be bong de dang, Bo!”

 I first heard this song while at sleep-away camp and even though it was the musical version of the Dodge Omni, I felt about it the way that my parents’ generation felt about “Satisfaction” or the way New York Times columnists felt the first time they saw the green grass at Yankee Stadium in a tedious Ken Burns documentary.

The biggest mistake I made when leaving camp was that despite the fact that I had learned all of the lyrics to True Fuschnick, I managed to leave without being certain of the name of the artists.  Since Al Gore was still skulking around in the Senate I was forced first to write a letter to a friend of questionable reliability asking him for the name, and second, to walk to the record store to sing a few bars to the clerk in hopes that might recognize it.   

In 1991 I had very little understanding of what it meant, socially, and in terms of musical taste or awareness, when someone smelled of incense, or wore a Phish tee shirt and a winter hat in the summer, but needless to say, he was not familiar with the song.

I don’t recall how I ultimately learned the name of the Fushnickens, but will never forget the day I got a call from the store informing me that my special order had arrived.

I played the cassette dutifully over the ensuing months to mixed reviews from my friends and parents and ultimately shelved it in favor of some more meaningful tunes, such as “The Power” by Snap, which made strong political statements with verses such as “It's gettin' it's gettin' it's gettin' kinda hectic, It's gettin' it's gettin' it's gettin' kinda hectic. It's gettin' it's gettin' it's gettin' kinda hectic. It's gettin' it's gettin' it's gettin' kinda hectic”.

Looking back I’m not certain whether today’s fast-moving world is so bad after all.  There is some danger to being able to acquire things at a moment’s notice with the touch of a button before you have a chance to figure out if it sucks, but on the flip side I’m not ready to go back to the day when a guy could invest 35 hours obtaining a song that contained the word “aggarniffum”.