Fort Lauderdale, 1986Phone Rings......
"You don't own me you bastard! You fucking asshole! You wanna suck my pussy? Well let ME suck your dick! Suck your dick, bastard bitch! Ooh, I wanna get your weiner in my ass! Well, I got your fuckin' cock and it's in my twat, good!...."
Beeeeep......
Voice of my mother: "I am never calling your house AGAIN until you call me and tell me that you have taken that HORRIBLE DISGUSTING song OFF your machine! Goodbye. CALL ME."
Karen Finley - Tales Of Taboo (Pow Wow Records, 1986)
This is one of the most appallingly obscene and disgusting vocal recordings of all time.
And my friends and I knew it word-for-word. And would perform it, loudly, a cappella, in front of horrified strangers at the drop of a hat. OK, maybe I still do that. It was a fairly big club hit, in the gay clubs anyway, and one of the many hilarious things about Tales Of Taboo was watching as people tried to figure out the title, which never appears in the song. Most commonly, we heard it called My Granny's Snatch, or Belgian Waffles, or sometimes The Yam Song. Listen and you'll understand why.
Performance artist Karen Finley was one of the NEA Four, a group of four artists, whose work so offended certain members of Congress that they called for ending the National Endowment For The Arts. Ms. Finley's offense was that during her act, she smeared her nude body with chocolate, and then invited the audience to come onstage and lick it off of her. Skewering her critics on the Hill, she followed up Tales Of Taboo with Lick It, which contains the immortal lyrics: "Lick me good, like you should. Lick me clean, no Afro-Sheen!"
Tales Of Taboo went on to become one of the most sampled records in the history of house music, most successfully on S-Express' Theme From S-Express, which included Ms. Finley shouting, "You drop that ghetto-blaster!"
This is the first time I've wished I was pod-casting, because if I were, I'd gladly perform for you my own live rendition of Tales Of Taboo, which is still burned into my skull, 19 years after I bought the 12". Now somebody make me a tit sandwich.
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