Song Of The Day 10/23/2014: Kool Moe Dee - "Go See The Doctor"

Cautionary Tales: The other night Spotify told my Facebook friends I was listening to Kool Moe Dee's "Go See The Doctor," an economic rap song about getting VD. My friend Brooks noticed this and re-placed the Spotify link to the song on my timeline. "Is there something that we need to talk about?" he asked. Ha, ha. I responded via comment, "I have no idea what you could possibly be thinking," along with a link to Ice Cube's "Look Who's Burnin'," which samples today's song, is also about VD, but is much funnier ("She thought she was wiser/Now she's sittin in the waitin room, burnin' like Heat Miser!") Oh, the joys of online jocularity amongst the educated lower middle class.

Kool Moe Dee's torrid tale of bacterial inconvenience was his first chart single back in 1986. You can hear some of hip hop's semi-awkward, post-Bambaataa, pre-Public Enemy growing pains on "Go See the Doctor." It's a bit corny. More than a little misogynist. But hot tamale, does it make its point: "Woke up fussing, yelling and cussing/ Drip-drip-dripping and pus-pus-pussing." The AP Style Guide reminds you that the word "pus" is never used as a verb, active or passive.

Oh, for those of you in the audience of the millennial persuasion: "VD" (vē-ˈdē) was a popular malady in the 20th century, brought about in many forms through the act of sexual congress, reaching its point of critical mass around the late '50s and early '60s when teenage and young adult secretions were serenaded out of bodies by Elvis Presley and Glenn Ford in The Blackboard Jungle. Compared to the grave health threats we face today, it was almost quaint. People in the Victorian era got it frequently as well, whipped into erotic frenzy by the Brontë sisters: Charlotte, Emily and Dixie. Nobody talks about Dixie anymore. She was sort of the black sheep. She worked in the stables. Let's just drop it.