In an interview with NBC’s Today show, Rachel Dolezal, the former Spokane NAACP chapter head who resigned this week after the revelation that she had been passing herself off as a black for years, said if she had the chance, she’d have done it all over again the same way.
One person who might not say the same is Dolezal’s one-time fiancé, Maurice Turner, after a musical testament to his undying love for Dolezal started getting passed around online this week.
The 2013 video, titled “for the rest of my life,” is a struggle-rap, seagull-R&B hybrid that lays Turner’s verses over pictures of his former flame.
“Baby you are as sexy as you wanna be. The ass is astronomical, your breasts are so phenomenal. Your legs are the sensual bridges to Heaven, the sweetest va jay jay more cosmic than the Milky Way.”
As you can imagine, the Internet has been having a field day poking fun at the song. “…He mighta gotten dumped based on them harmonies,” Questlove cracked.
On the plus side, not many aspiring artists will ever get to see their demo hit nearly 200,000 views on YouTube, so it’s not all bad news for Turner. And there are certainly no shortage of people who’ve managed to cobble together a career, however brief, out of musical ignominy.
Still, I couldn’t help but wonder if there wasn’t a way to salvage the song—after all, a rapper is only as successful as his producer. So I asked some of my musician friends if they thought they could take a crack at improving on the blueprint of the song.
“Oh my god, no,” and “Haha, I don’t think that’s possible,” were the most common answers.
One brave soul, Massachusetts producer and DJ Coralcola, a resident at the long running night Make It New at the Middlesex Lounge in Cambridge, Massachusetts, took me up on the challenge.
“Honestly, my first impression when I heard the song was that I wish somebody cared about me enough to write a song about me,” he said, adding that the vocals here were “so out of key.”
To fix the song, he simply “chopped and screwed it,” slowing the tempo significantly to 70 BPMs, and lowering the pitch of the vocals. It still may not be much of a potential hit, but it’s a vast improvement on the original.
