And I've already devised the mechanism of my demise. I will first draw a bubble bath and sidle in completely naked. Via remote sensor, the rising water levels will activate a television across the room, which will begin playing the episode of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air where Will invites Bel Biv Devoe to secretly film a music video at his uncle's house. (Either that, or the episode in which Carlton's guardian angel Tom Jones materializes to console him after being rejected from Princeton. This issue is up for committee vote.)
The studio audience's guest-star-triggered peals of adulation will frighten a nearby Toco Toucan (Ramphastos toco) whose flailing bill will activate an adjacent trebuchet. The siege engine will launch a boombox — with a 1000-yard extension cord and skip protection — blasting the rapper's 1997 single "Miami" square into my ablutions. I've crunched the numbers, and I will expire the very moment the background singer moans "¡Ay papi!" — her orgiastic blurt, tattooed on my synapses for eternity.
Why am I doing this? Because I don't want to live in a world where Will Smith can't sample a 1970-1980s soul-pop classic that you mostly hear in diners nowadays and make enough money to swim in it à la Scrooge McDuck.
For those of you haven't heard, Smith — who used Patrice Rushen and Stevie Wonder to promote Men in Black and Kenneth Branagh: Metal Arachnid Magnate, respectively — will be ceding the microphone to rapper Pitbull for Men in Black 3. Pitbull has sampled Mickey and Sylvia's 1957 song "Love is Strange" for "Back In Time," a remake that will almost assuredly contain zero puns on the given name "Willard." Said Mr. Bull, via the PR news sluice:
Wanting to keep the music fun yet modern, we used the slogan of the movie and flipped it back into the song that ‘in order to understand the future, you have to go back in time.Men in Black 3 director Barry Sonnenfield also lent further credence that movie studios must invest in an artificial intelligence to dole out press release quotes:
My 19-year-old daughter turned me on to Pitbull. I'm thrilled that he wrote such a great song for our movie that totally gets it.Clearly Mr. Sonnenfield does not get it. First, you absolutely never indulge your children's whims. If my parents never shattered my career aspirations at a young age, I'd currently be employed as a dinosaur rodeo tycoon or a Siberian lynx. Second, a Men in Black movie without a Will Smith pop single is a perversion of metaphysical proportions. It's some Grade-A, Baldur-and-the-mistletoe-arrow kind of shit.
Mind you, I'm not a diehard Will Smith fan. That song from Men in Black 2 kind of blew, and I'm okay with the fact that — after everybody got sick of Wild Wild West — DARPA cryogenically froze Sisqó like Wesley Snipes in Demolition Man as a bioweapon to be inflicted upon future generations.
But in our post-Enlightenment world, Will Smith is the closest thing we have to an antediluvian god-king. It's an unspoken law that men of a certain age aren't supposed to rap, although Jay-Z is currently pushing the boundaries of this paradigm, and Rodney Dangerfield is the greatest outlier known to humankind.
The Fresh Prince, through sheer force of his personality, could've changed the rules. After all, this is a man who is single-handedly financing America's shadow government thanks to his ability to say "getting jiggy with it" with a straight face. But no, he has recused himself to the iron maiden of public opinion, and we lap up his ichor, drunk off of hopes that his divine vitality will finally, just maybe cause our parents to understand.
So go fuck yourself, world of 2012. I want my reality directed by Hype Williams and with the opening 17 seconds of Dynasty's "Strokin" on infinite loop. If this is the brave new Willenium, I wash my hands of it. In sulfuric acid.
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