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Duran Duran - 911 Is a Joke
There was a post on Idolator the other day discussing Vanilla Ice's new hip hop cover album, Vanilla Ice Is Back. It should go without saying that the album itself is an auditory trainwreck, featuring as it does an electronica remake of Special Ed's I Got it Made, a metal version of P.E.'s Fight the Power and four different versions of Ice, Ice Baby. The low point of the album - and there are many moments on this album vying for that honor - has to be Ice's rendition of Bob Marley's Buffalo Soldier. It's awkward enough to hear Vanilla Ice sing about black soldiers being "stolen from Africa," but the addition of a vocoder at random points puts the whole thing over the top.
Getting back to the subject at hand, in the comments section of the Idolator post there was mention of a Duran Duran cover of Flavor Flav's 911 Is a Joke. Admittedly I've never made much of an effort to keep up with Duran Duran's career, other than to track down all of those samples that Puffy was jacking, but I was completely unaware that something like this existed. As bad as it is, though, I will give it props for the fact that it seems to be an earnest attempt at covering the Public Enemy version. Too often hip hop cover songs - Nina Gordon's acoustic folk version of N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton comes to mind - seem to be made solely as an exercise in irony.
For the benefit of those of you who only know Flavor Flav as a mascot for VH1, here's the original version of the song:
Public Enemy - 911 Is A Joke
11/11/2008 06:11:01 PM posted by Fresh