Blowfly Album Cover

[Lucrecio Poinson]

Reidwas born in Cochran, Georgia, in 1939 and moved to West Palm Beach, Florida, in his adolescence (c. 1949).[4][5] His stage name was given to him by his grandmother who he would visit in Georgia occasionally. During this time, Reid would make explicit parodies of the country music that was popular on the airwaves in Cochran then, prompting his grandmother to brand him a "blowfly".[5]

"In hillbilly, you'll find some of the best lyrics and morals. I used to listen to Homer and Jethro, and they would rap most of the time, only they didn't call it rap then. They used to call it soul talkin'. As a form of revenge, I would take songs like "The Twist," and I would change it from (sings) "Come on baby, let's do the twist" to "Come on baby, and suck my d-!" My grandma would say that's terrible, you're a poor excuse for a human being. Child, you're nastier than a blowfly."[5]

During the 1960s and 1970s he wrote for and produced artists including Betty Wright, Sam & Dave, Gwen McCrae, Jimmy "Bo" Horne, Bobby Byrd, and KC & the Sunshine Band. During this period he was also a recording artist, cutting many of his own songs, including "Nobody But You Babe" and his first XXX record, "Oddballs" which was reworked into "Rapp Dirty" several years later.[5][6]

Reid wrote sexually explicit versions of hit songs for fun but only performed them for his friends at parties or in the studio. In 1971, he along with a band of studio musicians, recorded a whole album of these songs under the name Blowfly. The album, The Weird World of Blowfly, features Reid dressed as a low-rent supervillain on its cover. Blowfly continued to perform in bizarre costumes as his Blowfly character and record sexually explicit albums throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Reid claimed to be one of the first artists to perform in a mask, and transitioned from a "tuxedo like Dracula" or a "buttless" Clint Eastwood inspired outfit, to the spandex suits that he became known for in response to public demand.[5] The albums were widely popular as "party records". He recorded the explicit version of his song "Rapp Dirty" (a.k.a. "Blowfly's Rapp") in 1980. Blowfly has been described as the root of Gangsta rap[7]

Blowfly's profane style earned Reid legal trouble. He was sued by songwriter Stanley Adams, who was ASCAP president at the time, for spoofing "What a Diff'rence a Day Makes" as "What a Difference a Lay Makes". Reid's own compositions have been sampled by dozens of hip hop, R&B, and electronic artists (such as Beyonce, Wu Tang Clan, DJ Quik, DMX, Method Man & Redman, Main Source, DJ Shadow, Eazy-E, RJD2, Jurassic 5, Big Daddy Kane, Mary J. Blige, Brand Nubian, and the Avalanches) but Reid received almost no money from sampling due to signing away most of his royalties.

Blowfly's Zodiac Blowfly LP (also released on CD in 1996 on Weird World Records) includes the songs "If Eating You Is Wrong, I Don't Want To Be Right", "The First Time Ever You Sucked My Dick", and "Ain't No Head Like My Woman's Head", as well as a version of "Clean Up Woman", which he co-wrote. Another album of this period is The Weird World of Blowfly.

In 2003, Blowfly sold the rights to his entire catalog after years of debt. After 17 years of sporadic touring and occasional re-recording of his classic raps, Blowfly signed with Jello Biafra's independent record label Alternative Tentacles in 2005. Fahrenheit 69, the first album under the new contract, featured appearances from Slug of Atmosphere, King Coleman, Gravy Train, and Afroman.

The obit for Clarence Reid, aka Blowfly (they made it one word, unlike the album cover) hit the New York Times today (Sunday Jan 24).

According to the obit, 'Mr. Reid said he began making up his dirty songs as a child as a way of needling white people. "It backfired on me," he said. "Everyone else wanted to please the crackers. I wanted to make 'em mad."

So, he regarded the success of Blow Fly as a sort of failure.

Mike O'Donnell

I "discovered" Blow Fly when I was a DJ at WBAB on Long Island around 1982 or so, when I also drove the WBAB Rock Stock race car at Islip Speedway. Everyone would bring out beer and "jungle juice" for the post-race pit parties, and I'd crank up my Blow Fly mixtapes (cassettes back then), and half the people would dance and laugh and the rest would blush and head for the hills!

The myth of the hypersexualized black male is one of the most potent tales ever told in this country. America's fascination with the black penis dates back to slavery, when Eurocentric rationalism proffered a mind-body split that placed Africans on par with chattel, and therefore more prone to be dominated by sexual urges than their "civilized" owners. Trace a line from slavery through anti-miscegenation laws, jazz and blaxploitation and you end up at hip-hop, America's latest contested racio-sexual space.

It's rarely clear whose zealotry is greater -- the critics who lambaste the genre for unrepentant misogyny and homophobia, or the artists who drape extreme, mindless (hetero)sexuality under a shroud of free speech and good vibes. Regardless, it's a particular strain of black masculinity at play in these debates: debased, unhealthy and, most crucially, other.

Despite what you see on the news, most artists wear their lecherous smirks with irony. Take, for example, Ol' Dirty Bastard's mania, Akinyele's foolish Casanova persona and the legendary Blowfly's playful boasting. Sex is natural. Sex is good. More important, sex is fun! And it turns out that a silver-tongued rapper who rhymes about carnal knowledge is often as popular with women as with men, if not more so.

All of which may well explain part of the curious mystique of Ol' Dirty Bastard, Wu-Tang Clan's nastiest member and, after a few arrests, last year's poster boy for misguided black male aggression. An unlikely sex symbol at best, and an incongruous fetish on any level, Ol' Dirty (or Russell Jones, as the cops call him) still posits himself as a lothario. Even more oddly, the ladies love him! Just ask the mothers of his kids (at least 13, according to Vibe), or the women who still hunt him down, or seduce him in the studio. A recent Rolling Stone article details some of the seedier moments of the recording of "Nigga Please," with one of the more shocking anecdotes involving a willing groupie, an off-key chorus and an ill-hit snare drum captured forever on wax.

Evidently, Dirty's is a fallible phallus. When not reading "Nigga Please," his second solo effort, as a gratuitously offensive record, and when not (kindly) viewing it as performance art, what pours from the seams of the album is the pain of our man's tribulations with the fairer sex. Tracks like the self-evident "I Want Pussy" and "All in Together Now" -- with the bold proclamation "I love you girls, 'cause you want to stick your tongue up in my ass" -- are juxtaposed with more conflicted sentiments. On "Cold Blooded," Dirty's Rick James homage (the second after the Jamesian pose ODB strikes on the album cover), the man simply confuses love and lust: "Love me tender, love me sweet/I wanna bust this nut in a superfreak." His rawest pain is saved for "Good Morning Heartache." Here, it's Lil' Mo who provides the melodic support, but it's Dirty's deranged, irony-free squeal-for-squeal accompaniment that gives the song oomph. "Stop haunting me now/Can't shake you no how/Why don't you leave me alone?" the duo plead to their faceless hurt, stopping the album's ribaldry right in its tracks, however ephemerally.

Akinyele's sexual quest, though, gets no such reprieve. A B-list rapper for some years, his most notable excursions into the mainstream have been for his humorous nods to good lovin'. His first album was titled "Vagina Diner," but only offered a hint of the sextastic anthems to come. Nineteen-ninety-six was Ak's breakout year, with two freaknasty tales making the rounds: "Put It In Your Mouth" was a beatific ode to oral sex (going both ways, as Ak both gave to and received from his female partner), while "Fuck Me For Free" trudged its way through a litany of reasons why one should do so. (Ol' Dirty's inadvertent update of the theme on "Nigga Please" -- "I want pussy/For free" -- is somehow even more compelling).

Yet since Ak achieved notoriety he's come to rely exclusively on the sex game, eschewing a harder, battle-rap side. Gone are insurgencies of braggadocio like "The Bomb" and the rough storytelling of "Robbery Song." Instead, he's delivered a nymphoid new album, accompanied by an hour-long plush-core flick, neither of which have any of the daring or vim of his earlier sexplorations. Taking hip-hop's obsession with the past to new lows, he borrows -- musically or intellectually -- from a slew of songs: Jimmy Buffett's "Why Don't We Get Drunk and Screw," Jermaine Stewart's "We Don't Have to Take Our Clothes Off," Whodini's "I'm a Ho" and Notorious B.I.G.'s "Juicy." He even bites Adina Howard's "Freak Like Me" on two different tracks. It's so dully derivative that it's painful. Nicking Biggie Smalls, he inquires on "Coochie," "Remember Brand Nubian, One For All?/Who'd ever thought that Ak-nel would get paid to grab his balls?" Not I, fair sir. Not I.

Blowfly, on the other hand, knows the sex-commerce axis all too well. Born Clarence Reid some 54 years ago, the man has made an entire cottage industry since 1978 out of recording obscene, absurd sex comedies. A legend in the South, Reid doubles as a traditional soul singer, but it's his album-length excursions into sexual nether regions that get him play and have made him an inspiration for a legion of raunchy blokes, from Chris Rock to Luke.

Simplistic in cadence and delivery, Blowfly will never win any prizes for lyrical deftness, yet his dirty old man image gives his debauched stories added zing. Not that an album like "Blowfly For President" (originally from 1988, reissued last year), a long-form audio fantasy in which Blowfly, as the first black president, recommends a heavy diet of orgiastic behavior to solve world strife, needs any extra bounce, but the additional lechery helps.

3a8082e126