Slick Rick, "Adults Only"

Though this is perhaps the 10th song I’ve written about, I have to break the mold, already. So far, I’ve listened to each song a few times, collecting impressions new and old; I re-read the lyrics, correcting misinterpretations and connecting ideas.

Yet I refuse to listen to “Adults Only” again.

To engage with this song is to beckon a bird of prey, to accept its perch on your shoulder, to welcome its maw, which swiftly finds your ear, pressing your membranes, prodding them, slicing them, believing the deeper it gets, the more whole you’ll become. It won’t take long to find your cochlea, and your nerves. You were alone, then came the bird; now you’re new.

I remember how compromised I felt, how drenched and exhausted, after first listening to my brother’s copy of The Art of Storytelling. Slick Rick is a master storyteller, indeed. As a lifelong admirer of stories, their intentions and machinations, I should admit that, after first enduring it, I learned a few things from “Adults Only.” Thankfully, though, they were entirely about point of view.

In “Adults Only,” we have a self-proclaimed “Ruler” seeing, and seeding, his domain.

In no time at all, Rick’s mouth starts “foamin’,” and the misrepresentations begin. To the egomaniacal and twisted, perspiration has only one inspiration. And it isn’t nerves. He mentions playing “his cards right,” as if he bothered to deal his date a hand. Cackling with laid back, sinister glee, Rick performs one parlor trick after another; after all, he holds all the cards. Personification as an assistant - “the hungry little butthole,” “the table was barrin’ her” - and simile as an accomplice - “She said it felt like a bulldozer boring her,” “I’m all over her like an octopus” - Rick self serves, victims be damned, ignored, and expended.

And yet - she has her say in the end. A simple denouement: “More, more, more!” A final lesson: a story does not require hope or realism to conclude. A work of fiction just needs to finish.