Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell — Soul Cover
I'm at the Pizza Hut
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Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell — Soul Cover
Two friends on their phones, inside one building, trying to find each other. That is the whole song. Das Racist posted Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell free to MySpace in 2008, recorded in a basement in a single take, and its lyric is a man reporting his location over and over: Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell on Jamaica Avenue in Queens. 1
Critics have spent years deciding whether it is a dadaist joke about corporate America or two stoners with a microphone. Rolling Stone landed on "hilarious, impossibly catchy and a statement about late-capitalist nausea". The Village Voice said the line passes "from grating to absurd to hilarious to poignant to transcendent". Both readings survive the same three sentences. 1
Here those sentences become a Southern soul ballad. A Hammond organ holds the chord, an upright bass walks underneath, brushed drums keep the slow time, and a gospel choir answers the lead the way a congregation answers a preacher: What?, Naw, Where you at?. One soft, breathy male voice sings it all as testimony. "I'm at the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell" arrives like something he has to get off his chest, and by the bridge, "I don't see you here, dawg" is the loneliest line in the song, which nobody expected it to be.
Every word is Das Racist's own, and the released lyric contains no profanity at all, so nothing was cut or softened. 2 Play it late, lights low, ideally somewhere with a laminated menu. One more thing worth carrying into the dark: Yum! Brands has closed most of those combination restaurants since, so the song now describes a place that barely exists.
References
- 1"Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell" — Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 2
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