First song on the list, so let's get it started. Wait--I thought the title was "Let's Get It Started"? It is--and it isn't. The song's original title, "Let's Get Retarded" was changed (or censored, depending on one's point of view) because the word retarded has been deemed offensive, the term now a pejorative of the mentally handicapped--which I shouldn't say either, because I believe the new term is mentally challenged. It's possible that the Peas were being insinsitive to use that word in the title and in the song's lyrics, and perhaps I'm being insinsitive in using it here, but I don't perceive it as such. In fact I think the term retarded is essential to the song's message.
The Peas use retarded not to denote stupidity or verbal incoherence, but to denote freedom: dancing without inhibitions, without social constraints, without the limitations of self-consciousness, shaking your body, losing fine motor control, getting loose. Retarded meaning the physical and mental freedom brought about by music and dancing: freedom that releases the mind from prejudice, from hatred, from low self-esteem, from insensitivity—freedom to move your body to the beat (and it’s a great beat, rhythmically supplementing the minimal guitar beat on the one and two, and the chorus chants of “Hah!”). Retarded as freedom, Retarded as dancing, dancing as physical movement, and dancing as movement from the physical to the cerebral to the spiritual and back to the physical. Retarded as the song says: “We got five minutes for us to disconnect from all intellect and let the rhythm connect.”
So, everyone, let’s accept that we’re living a new millennium, that hip-hop is here to stay, that hip-hop is using music and language to create a new version of the old culture, one for a new generation, just as the rockers of the ‘50s used the music and language of various disparate cultures and subcultures to create a whole new world. Or we could just forget all that mess—and just dance. So let’s get retarded.
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