The day after the dream, I searched the Internet for “New Jeru” and found a page called “New Jeru Rappers,” apparently referring to New Jersey. There were some rap lyrics on the page, of which only this couplet stuck in my memory:
Wiggity-wiggity, New JeruWill kick your ass with your own shoe
I don’t think it actually said “wiggity-wiggity.” I added that later to pad out the meter because I’d forgotten the rest of the line. The rest of it is verbatim, though.
Except that there’s no trace of it on the Internet now. Zero hits for “New Jeru Rappers.” Just one hit for “kick your ass with your own shoe,” and it’s a podcast transcript from 2020, much too recent (about a fight at a hockey game in the 1970s where someone was literally beaten with his own shoe; includes random references to Lucky Charms and Lord of the Rings).
Did I hallucinate the whole thing? Was the web searching part of the dream, too, and I misremembered it as a waking experience? Did it fall victim to the Mandrill Effect? Or is it just that, as Hugh Nibley once observed, “People underestimate the capacity of things to disappear”?
Apparently the work of the New Jeru Rappers, like that of the pre-Socratic philosophers, is fated to survive only in fragmentary quotations in the writings of others, like myself. At least I’ve rescued a line and a half from oblivion.
5 comments:
“New Jeru" is often slang for New Jersey, especially in hip-hop culture (popularized by artists like Jeru the Damaja, though he’s from Brooklyn).
SO MANY things have disappeared from internet searches over the past 20 years - at least, so far as internet searches get served up to the public. That old wiseacre saying "the internet is forever" apples, if at all, only to the intelligence services.
I have long read it as New J-Eru-Salem, a reference to a city aligned with Eru, the One.
William,
I found this.
https://www.therightrhymes.com/new-jeru/#e7845_n_1
https://open.spotify.com/track/6ccow8Rh5Tb48mmHnpfH32
William,
I apologize that this comment is
not on topic with this thread, however
I did find another Carrie reference with connection to
the song Vehicle.
Copy and Paste wiki :
"Peterik wrote "Vehicle" as a tongue-in-cheek joke,
having been initially inspired by anti-drug pamphlets
passed out to high-schoolers.
He expanded on the song's genesis in a piece
for The Wall Street Journal:
At the time, I was madly in love with this girl named
**** Karen.
I had a souped-up 1964 Plymouth Valiant,
and she was always asking for rides.
. I drove her to modeling school every week.
I was hoping flames would ignite—but they didn't.
I came home one day, dejected, and thought:
all I am is her vehicle. And I thought: Wow! Vehicle!
I came up with this song, taught it to the band,
and the next thing I knew, we were recording
in a CBS studio. "
~~~~~~
Karen or Caren?
Of course you know this about the letters
K and C,
Copy and paste:
"In English, the letter "k" replaces "c" in specific situations,
primarily when the /k/ sound precedes
the letters "i", "e", or "y" at the beginning
of a word or syllable. This rule is often summarized
as "k before i, e, and y".
For example, words like "kite," "keep," and "key"
use "k" while words like "cat," "cot," and "cut" use "c".
~~~~~~
Also, not surprisingly, Vehicle was released in
March of 1970.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_(song)
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