Saddam Loyalists Claim Responsibility for Gigli

merican forces and the new Iraqi regime took another blow this week when Saddam loyalists hidden on the outskirts of Baghdad took responsibility for the disastrous Ben Affleck-Jennifer Lopez film, Gigli. The film, a reputedly putrid and cloying pairing of America's hottest celebrity couple under the helm of Scent of a Woman director Martin Brest, has been universally blasted as one of the worst movies in recent history. Which is saying quite a lot.

In a short statement on a video tape released to Al Jazeera, a ventriloquil figure purported to be Saddam Hussein credited the bomb, detrimental to the careers of Affleck, Lopez, Brest, and anyone else who touched it, to the movement of Saddam Hussein loyalists.

"The capitalist pig culture has been punished by Allah for its excesses in the most fitting fashion imaginable. We of the Iraqi regime loyalists claim full responsibility for this catastrophe. A strike to the heart of America in the name of Allah! The next time imperialists seek to meddle in the affairs of the Middle East, watch the critically impaired dialogue and undigestable chemistry forced upon your citizens."

Spokesmen for the U.S. government and Hollywood alike allege Saddam loyalists are trying to put the American public to fear, taking credit for a natural disaster they had nothing to do with, and assure the populace that Middle Eastern terrorist groups do not have the capability to sign big stars into bombs and weaken scripts or mis-edit major productions. Others defend the movie as "not that bad."

Despite the assurances of the government and celebrity authorities that Gigli is a misfire of a few studio producers and not the work of anti-American fanatics, the media has latched onto the claim and begun to question other recent disasters. While reasonably convinced Al-Qaeda or other anti-American groups are not responsible for northeastern power outages, leading media outlets are asking if Osama bin Laden may have been responsible for failed Julia Roberts-Brad Pitt vehicle The Mexican. Some postulate the film was much better and ruined by bin Laden or associates, who then refused to take responsibility for it when it turned out too atrocious.

Hollywood watchdog website www.stargaze.com has taken the bold step of suggesting Saddam loyalists, linked to Al-Qaeda, have carried out the most disastrous summer box office bombing of all time in the summer of 2003. From digital debacle The Hulk, all the way back to the underwhelming The Matrix Reloaded, the onslaught of movies that have failed to hold the number one slot or in any way live up to audience expectations has been too perfectly a Hollywood failure to be chalked up to poor studio executives and directors too apt to insult the intelligence of mainstream America. According to the website, Gigli is merely the capper designed to forever disillusion American movie-goers after the disappointing blitz of Charlie's Angels Full Throttle, Terminator 3, American Wedding, and Hollywood Homicide.

"Celebrity mismatches, cul-de-sac scripts, sequels we never asked for to movies that weren't that good to begin with," the website claimed, "this is nothing like the Hollywood we've come to know and love. They have either thrown in with the America haters in the Middle East or are the dupes of spies and con-men trying to unravel the fabric of our celluloid culture."

The investigators at www.stargaze.com stated they would reward any evidence providing a link between Al-Qaeda and the AOL-Time-Warner, and planned a three-part study next to examine the role of terrorists in the music industry since 1997.

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Sorry, pardon the bad attitude, but I'm fresh out of condoms. What really pisses me off is that it probably won't make a difference. Think about it for a minute, if running out of rubbers is going to change your day at all and you'll probably get pissed off, too. So let's both get pissed off and dig in.

I probably wouldn't be so dang incensed if I had actually used it in some fashion, even heroin smuggling, but no, I gave it away out of the goodness of my heart. Just some kid who gave me a hard-luck story about not having any money and needing a prophylactic, so I loaned him one—to be paid back with interest. I thought I was doing a good deed! No, turns out this kid just puts it on like a hat and runs off and I find out later he's some lunatic who's scammed sixty free rubbers off of suckers like me. The world's a sad place sometimes.

Oh, I just saw jackass: the movie, by the way. So what's the big deal? Seems like any normal weekend with your buddies and a trunk full of beer to me. Putting a taser to your nutsack and jumping out of a tree with a bungee cord attached to your underwear isn't even a memorable weekend on my block. Those jackass guys should bring me aboard as a consultant or something. I have a brilliant idea for a sequel, and I've tried it before so I know it works—it involves two hundred chocolate bars, a bag full of marmosets, and a high school bully who works in a hospital burn ward lately. That's all I'm saying until we ink a deal, this cow don't give away milk for free.

This just fresh in from the list of things that pisses me off: You're sitting there, trying to enjoy a Captain D's shrimp dinner with hush puppies and some pre-teen priss in a pink sweater materializes on the TV and asks, "Can we talk about something personal?" Not if you want this shrimp to stay down, Sabrina. There is no way, no matter how loud you yell, to cut this discussion off before it starts. I don't know why these nasty tarts are asking me if they can talk about it when they know I can't answer, like they just want to taunt me. Mark my words, if I ever see one of these stuck-up debutantes sitting in a restaurant enjoying snails and squid I'm going to pull up a chair and start talking loudly about that bout of crabs back in 1993.

I've been watching TV Land all this week and had a scary thought: If aliens were receiving our broadcast signals and watching only TV Land, they would assume Scott Baio held a very high position in our government, like a world leader or something, mayhap even a god. Between Charles in Charge and Happy Days there is a vast over-representation of Scott Baio in our TV history. It keeps me up some nights thinking about it. Our best hope, if this were the case, is that all those commercials for scrubbing bubbles would scare the aliens into thinking we had nano-technology that would destroy them.

I'm developing my own take-off on that Kevin Bacon game, and I'm planning on calling it "Stu Umbrage's Six Hyperlinks to Amazon.com." Your friends come over, they all write down various word strings and dump them into a bowler hat, and people draw the word strings and search Yahoo or Hotbot or something for them, then they have six hyperlinks to get to Amazon.com from any of those sites. First person wins it all! In case you're wondering, I plan on selling the bowler hats for the game and I will make a killing. I'll be like that Pet Rock guy nobody remembers.

I had planned on launching a political diatribe concerning the recent elections, but you can see where all that ranks in the Stu Umbrage animal kingdom. Frankly, I'm bored with voting and supporting candidates. They started generating politicians out of a machine a few years ago and none of them are interesting to watch or listen to anymore—which is how they get elected, I guess. I'm looking for a political firebrand to earn my vote. If anybody wants to take care of insane condom bums and the Scott Baio TV Land inundation, I personally promise you a write-in vote the next go-round.

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It's a question that I get asked on a nearly daily basis, and understandably: just what in the hell was wrong with American music in the 1950's? History has it that the 1960's were the decade of recreational and experimental drug use, citing such examples of delusionary flakery as Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit, The Beatles' I Am the Walrus and Gregg Allman's hair. And while I wouldn't argue against these as prime examples of pharmaceutical excess, they pale mightily in comparison to the near-psychotic mutant trend of late-50's doo-wop music. John Lennon may have envisioned Mean Mr. Mustard dripping from a dead dog's eye, but even this game of Clue gone horribly wrong looks downright pedestrian next to a jabbering psychopath questioning who exactly put the ram in the rama-lama-ding-dong.

Like a drugged-up visitor from deep space, doo-wop appeared seemingly out of nowhere, holing up in the chests of America's great pop stars in the late 50's and early 60's. From this parasitic enclave it communicated with the world through a bewitching combination of di-dits, bompa-bomps, ding-dangs, shooby-doos and doh-dohs. Why did it come, and what was it hoping to communicate to us? Nobody knows, though our best guess is that it had to do with seeking therapy for a stuttering problem.

The earliest known recording of the mutant doo-wop style was the Orioles' 1948 tune It's Too Soon To Know. During the recording of what was, by all reports, a fairly normal song, lead singer Sonny Til suffered the massive variety of nervous breakdown and began singing rhyming gibberish vaguely related to his ex-wife winning custody of their home and the recent transmission failure of his Oldsmobile. Fearing for their own lives, the band continued to play and discovered to their dismay that when they had finished the take they were at the end of their studio time. As was a common practice at the time, the record company had only secured them ten minutes of recording time to record and mix the song, and they'd had to sell bass player Johnny Reed's virginity in the process as they were obligated to pay for the studio time themselves.

Low on options and wary of bat-wielding record company thugs, the band played it cool, acting as if the recording session had gone fine. The record was released as-is by record company execs who were so outside of the loop that they once released a recorded armpit fart as a single, snookered by an engineer with a sense of humor. Back in that day all of the record companies were so desperate for a hit they would release anything, sometimes even recordings of other records held up to a microphone, as the execs in charge all listened to marching bands and had no clue what the record-buying teens of the day were into. They seldom listened to the records they put out, which led to the infamous "My Ding-a-Ling" scandal of 1972.

It's Too Soon To Know wasn't a huge hit, but it sold surprisingly well considering the totally bugshit nature of the vocals. It also proved to be heavily influential for a young aspiring songwriter named Richard Lewis, who crashed his car into a grocery store the first time he heard it on the radio. Many say Lewis never recovered psychologically from the incident, but he did go on to form The Silhouettes, and pen the 1957 mega-hit Get a Job. That song introduced the stuttering, nonsensical vocal stylings that came to be known as doo-wop to the world.

Some purists and historians have argued that Get a Job was only a hit because Lewis' uncle owned the Junior Records label and made sure the song was played on Dick Clark's American Bandstand, which guaranteed it would be a hit among the easily-led youth of the day. Others might disagree, but the success of the 1959 hit Dog Barking in the Back Alley seems to lead credence to the theory, since the rare sound-effects single likely would not have reached #1 if it had not been featured on American Bandstand earlier that year.

Whatever the reason, Get a Job was a smash single, and Americans were quick to concede that if it's what everyone else was listening to, then they were into lyrics like "Yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip ma ma ma ma ma ma ma ma" and colossally embarrassing bass singers, too.

Other bands smelled the money train and were quick to follow, solidifying doo-wop as a legitimate musical movement and a bad name for a hair salon. Not long after, The Marcels released the doo-wop manifesto Blue Moon in 1961, daring America to make sense of their statement of purpose: "Bom bom ba-bom ba-bom ba-bom bom ba-dang a lang lang a ding a dang ding Blue Moon…"

But by late 1961 doo-wop was beginning to lose it's luster, beginning with Barry Mann's hit Who Put the Bomp?, at which point fans began to suspect that the magic was gone and that doo-wop artists were just bullshitting them now. What began as a street movement had been exploited to the limits of credibility, and all of the bomps and sha-na-na's had begun to ring hollow.

By 1964 doo-wop was a mere ghost on the American musical landscape, as record-buyers turned away from the bubblegum of their youth and embraced the British Invasion of more vital artists, replacing their embarrassing Shep and The Limelites platters with the more mature pleasures of Manfred Mann's Do Wah Diddy Diddy. The rest, as they say, is history.

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