YELLOW CAKE
Title:
YELLOW CAKE
Artist:
GEORGE BILEK & THE BARGAIN BASEMENT BAND
Originally Recorded/Released:
1997 (Bargain Basement Productions un-numbered cassette single)
The Imprecise Story of “Yellow Cake”
(as best as I could
comprehend it...)
by Chris thews
Well Erin rings me up
one day back in ‘97 and sez: “I wanna hire you to produce a song
with me. It’s really
weird but you gotta trust me!”
She proceeds to explain how this latest songcrafting
class she’s taking has quite a wild variety of students,
including one 72-year-old Czech-o-slovakian man named George
Bilek. Now, whereas
most of the others present the sort of demos you’d probably
expect from aspiring L.A. writers, Mr. Bilek bowls ‘em over with
a stunning original kind of Slavic-folk-reggae-rap piece -- and
Erin immediately knows she has just got to help him fully
realize his vision.
Somehow she gets him to let us do all this goofy stuff to the
song, and when the class plays their final products on the last
day of school, George’s is truly the most gorgeous of them all,
and everyone applauds a lot.
‘Tis only then that Erin dares to ask what the heavily-symbolic
image of the “yellow cake” truly stands for.
George reveals that he had written the entire thing while
sitting in a soul-food BBQ house somewhere in L.A., rap music
blaring over a jukebox and him thinking, “Hey if they can get
rich doing THAT, so can I!”
The notion of American prosperity was suggested to him
most clearly by the patrons enjoying slices from a giant pan
holding one abundant yellow cake.
“Cornbread!?”
cries Erin. “It’s
about CORNBREAD!?”
“No, not bread -- CAKE!
Yellow cake!”
Sock it to me, sock it to me yellow cake...