the improbable popstar

welcome to kirkby's random brain dump blogging day. today's topic is scatman john whom i like to call the improbable popstar.

jazz musician john larkin was the improbable popstar for many reason. when he skyrocketed to popstar fame in the mid 90s he was over 50 years old and had only had a moderately successful jazz music career in germany. his agent suggested he take his scat style of singing into the modern age by mixing it with the techno sound popular at the time and scatman john was (re)born.

at a time when the nihilistic stylings of grunge seemed to be leading the direction of popular music, the scatman's message of encouragement seemed to kick against the trend. this upbeat and positive message was interspersed at times with a decidedly "unhip" pro-life message. one can only hope the lyrics "while you still sleepin' the saints are still weeping cause the things you call dead haven't yet had the chance to be born" would make some of the "do-what-feels-good" crowd to pause and think about consequences.

the most surprising improbability to the scatman's career, however, was the fact that he suffered from a debilitating stutter since the day he could talk. he could rarely speak a sentence without having to repeat it multiple time, but while he sang his fast-paced scat style of singing, you could never tell that he had a stuttering problem. the scatman gave a clue to his amazing scat ability in his lyrics when he sang "what you don't know i'm gonna tell you right now that the stutter and the scat are the same thing". he took his weakness and turned into a strength and perhaps this is why people so responded to his career.

the scatman's rebirthed career was unfortunately short-lived since he died of lung cancer in december of 1999.

so let's all give a big Ski-Ba-Bop-Ba-Dop-Bop to the scatman.