Most good ideas are simple.

Flip-flops, beer, and chicken sa-tay.

Individually, not as a combination dinner..

Flip-flops save people’s feet. Beer quenches their thirst and chicken sa-tay is a tremendous appetizer.

Success = Keep it simple stupid.

Bad ideas are the exact opposite, since guile is needed to convince the public to purchase something they really don’t want.

SUV, time-share apartments on the Costa Brava, and Happy Meals at McDonalds. Billions of dollars are spent to enhance these non-essentials with a sense of purpose. But you really don’t need them.

Not like flips-flops, beer, and chicken sa-tay or tacos or pizza or pho soup in Vietnam).

Good music like the Leadbelly, Al Green or Miles Davis.

Music with soul and heart.

Back in 1974 I saw the Fundadelic Parliment at a pimp bar in Boston. The Sugar Shack. Not at its original downtown, but in the lobby of a Commonwealth Avenue hotel. The players and their ladies danced poolside to George Clinton. This was funk. This was sex. This was it and I thought it would last forever.

Barely made it out of the 70s.

Disco killed everything and then disco got killed by rap.

Rap had taken over the world.

They rap in Japan, France, and even here in Thailand.

Rap came from a simple beginning and remains simple which is why the record company execs love rap.

No music. No band. No royalties to anyone but the rapper.

Looking at the Billboard Chart Top Hot 10 you’ll see that Rap and Pop dominated the airwaves and sales in America.

1 Justin Timberlake ( my niece loves him )

2 Fergie – London Bridge    
3 Sean Paul Feat. Keyshia Cole (When You Gonna) Give It Up To Me     
4 Gnarls Barkley Crazy    
5 The Pussycat Dolls Featuring Snoop Dogg6 Nelly Furtado Featuring Timbaland – Promiscuous     
7 Cassie Me & U         
8 Danity Kane – Show Stopper     
9 Ne-Yo – Sexy Love      
10 Evanescence – Call Me When You’re Sober 

I haven’t heard a single CD on this list, which is as good any indication of being uncool in the eyes of anyone under 20, then again back in 1986 a young singer came to my apartment on East 10th Street. We were thinking about sex. As I opened the door she said she had been there before with my Swede subletting my apartment. She said it was a great place and wondered who the real tenant was. I felt good about this, until she added, “Seeing the LPs I realized he was some old hippie.”

Some old hippie!

She left without doing a thing, so I realize why now everyone wants to rap. To not be an old hippie or pop star, which brings me to the worst bad idea of the month.

Elton John has announced he is going to rap. Mr Bennie and the Jets said, “I want to bring my songs and melodies to hip-hop beats — a bit like no ‘No Diggity’ by Blackstreet. I love these beats, but I have no idea how to get them.”

“Candle in the wind with my big fat spliff.”

Elton ain’t no Elvis to be go stealing rapper’s shit, but he is telling the world he’s coming and he has the green to make it happen. ”I want to work with Pharrell, Timbaland, Snoop, Kanye, Eminem and just see what happens. It may be a disaster, it could be fantastic, but you don’t know until you try.”

Maybe the Second Coming isn’t that far away after all.

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