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DJ Webstar f/ Young B :: "Chicken Noodle Soup"Chicken Noodle Soup (2006)
This year’s biggest wtf dance craze hinges on a hook which reads like instructions for getting over a mild head cold. Best part of the whole fiasco: everyone who will watch someone/anyone do the Chicken Noodle Soup and then cry, “That’s not how you do the Chicken Noodle Soup!” Probably because no one actually knows how to do the Chicken Noodle Soup well -- the only constants are the jazz hands miming “let it rain, and clear it out” and the bowlegged shuffle that’s about the most self-racist and degrading piece of choreography this side of a Ying Yang video. These touchstone elements will automatically make the slickest mover look like a dunce, and since the Chicken Noodle Soup is the hot thing right now, most people fault the dancers for not doing it right, not the dance itself for being ridiculous and repugnant. 106 & Park might not say as much, but it’s built a quest on finding the correct way to chicken noodle, and so far they’ve given the world Chris Brown doing what looks like the interpretive dance version of an Urkel and Napoleon Dynamite “If They Mated.” Ladies and gentlemen, the emperor is extremely naked.
As for the trifling song behind this mass image suicide, Young B’s only evident talent is that of not sounding a day over 11 years old while Webstar artlessly dumps the “Ring the Alarm” air raid into a trendy 808 thud. Maybe, just maybe, Young B by herself could convince of some intention at capturing youth’s joie de vivre, but that’s at odds with the beat’s cheerless club-grind, which is well on its way to becoming a more accepted exploitation of urban children dance movement than anything Missy could have dreamt. There’s harmless fun, and then there’s a sort of lunacy that’s harmful by the way it’s made to inundate the mainstream, where commercialism tweezers subcultural splinters for mass production and out-of-context tropes have the chance to become our next national embarrassment. “Chicken Noodle Soup” errs unblinkingly towards the latter. Expect a formal apology from the Harlem underground in a couple months, and pray that Young B’s rumored full-length gets snatched up by Jive.
Chet Betz :: 10 November 2006 |
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