| As
we are all painfully aware, hip-hop artist Nelly has hit the
big time these days, and it's hard to turn a corner without
hearing a song by the ubiquitous rapstar, or at least someone
unconsciously humming one. Nelly's powerhouse superstarmachine
is on a direct line to the hearts and heads of consumers everywhere.
Apparently his music has had such an effect on me that I am
losing my ability to form coherent sentences, as evidenced
by that last one. I mean, 'powerhouse superstarmachine'? What
was I thinking?
This is Nelly.
Do not believe anything he says.
All
confusion aside, I think I should get to the point of the
article. So here we go. As I was retrofitting my
website for its shiny new design the other day, my
awesome website, shiny
new design, go
there now now now, I came across the something that made
me think.
Nelly,
seen above, is famous for his controversial, and yet incredibly
stupid song, "Hot In Herre", intentional misspelling
and all, with the signature chorus -
"It's
getting hot in here.
So take off all your clothes."
Imagine
then my shock as I am happily ctrl-c'ing and ctrl-v'ing my
way through my archives on my nice
shiny new new new website and I come across Conrad's old
comic, Edward
Pee-Hole v1.0. In it, the protagonist, a Mr. E. P. Hole,
decides that he is too hot and that he will remove a few layers.
Sound familiar?
A terrible omen of what is to come!
Ultimately,
his actions are found incredibly offensive, even to the point
of killing one of the other people in the room. But that's
beside the point, which is that Nelly ripped off Edward
Pee-Hole. Now when Conrad's in his whole "Serious
Cool" rap-guy mode, he's pretty scary and intense, as
you can see here-
Conrad's
Alter-ego, "Simply Rules" or something
-but
regular Conrad is a pretty down-to-earth, even timid guy.
Seeing this travesty, I knew he wouldn't take it upon himself
to stand up against Nelly for this terrible act of plagiarism.
So that's why I'm taking his cause up for him. I'm here to
stand up against the tyrannical power that is Nelly, and to
say "hey! stop...uh...stop ripping people off! Just,
y'know, quit it!"
At
least, that was my stance until I did some further
digging. Since that fateful evening I have made another
discovery that leaves the first one in the dust. Both Nelly
and Conrad are ripping off...
why,
who else, but...
Playwright William Shakespeare!
Yes,
the venerable playwright is in fact the provider of the source
material for both of these thieves! Exerpted from an unfinished
work, the original lines read as follows -
Eduarde
The temperature on the premises
exceeds even my tolerance!
Would that I had never donned the suit
of armor I now wear!
Ah!
I now see fit
to remove it completely-
Of
course, when he removes the armor, an assassin leaps into
the room and slays him. He then kills the guards that come
up to investigate, and finishes by killing himself, but not
before rambling for half an hour about how sorry he is that
he ever married the Queen.
Since
everybody in the entire world has ripped off Shakespeare at
some point in their lives, I imagine there are a few other
people in the chain of plagiarism seen here. This is further
evidenced by the fact that Conrad is illiterate and as such
Shakespeare would probably make his head start on fire. However,
I can only guess as to the mystery participints in our little
tale of treachery. Perhaps when Conrad is on his death bed
he will admit to his true inspiration for Edward Pee-Hole,
and when Nelly is on his soiled death-mattress (in his death-cardboard-box)
he will admit to the true inspiration for the awful, awful
song he has inflicted on the world. Until then, we can only
speculate... |
