5. Let's Get It On
“McDonald’s should get a Michelin star.”
This is one of those opinions that gets circulated for cheap clicks—the hyperbolic defense of the popular, low-brow thing. I don’t want to engage with it too much, but I do think, flavor-wise, gustatory pleasure-wise, a lot of folks underrate McDonald’s.
McDonald’s has McDonald’s flavor. I’m sure a food expert could tell me that it’s monosodium glutamate or beef tallow or genetically engineered whatever. The best way I can describe it is that it tastes deliciously fake.
I have a modest vegetable garden in my backyard. Every year, I grow a small crop of snow peas. When I’m outside in the early spring, I walk over and munch a few. They taste so fresh, so sweet, so real. McDonald’s flavor is the opposite of this. It tastes like chemicals. But, and please hear me out, it tastes like good chemicals.
Other super processed foods have flavors on this spectrum. Down the road from my house is a soft serve and fried chicken joint. My go-to order is vanilla in a bowl with the chocolate shell—the syrup that hardens on contact with cold. It has a similar, fake deliciousness. So good. Same with boxed mashed potatoes. Same with store brand whipped dessert topping.
A story I can tell myself about why I like professional wrestling is that it is also deliciously fake. I know it’s probably, objectively, not good. I know that it’s popular with a type of guy I don’t want to emulate. I know it hurts those involved, and I know it hurts me.
But that doesn’t stop me from inviting a bunch of friends over for the Royal Rumble and delighting when the antics on screen make them laugh. When they’re distracted but whip their attention to the screen when they hear the countdown before the next wrestler appears. In these moments, I want to shout, “Can’t you TASTE it?”
Is Be a Man, the debut rap album from former professional wrestler Macho Man Randy Savage, deliciously fake? Well, if we judge it by “Let’s Get It On,” it’s fifth track, the verdict is clear. The ice cream has melted. The potatoes have failed to reconstitute. The Mac Sauce has turned.
There’s almost nothing here. It’s a 2 minute, 38 second song with a 30-second outro. Before that, the hook repeats and repeats. Macho raps for only 45 seconds. This song is filler that the Big3 boys thought they could hide under “Hit the Floor,” their one passing effort so far.
There’s a lucrative corner of the movie industry built on the “it’s so bad it’s good” phenomenon. Spectacular cinematic failures, when they are honest attempts by truly futile filmmakers, can be really fun to watch. In food, there’s no such thing. Food must meet minimum quality standards, or it could literally kill you. Music, I think, is somewhere in the middle. You won’t be harmed by a bad song, but there is a bar beneath which no serious person can claim enjoyment.
The most impressive thing about this track is how nimble it appears in its attempt to limbo under that bar.
1 out of 5 good chemicals.