Funky Cold Medina (Photo credit: Alegrya)

By Eric Ralph

Sometimes being an author has a real downside. When you spend a lot of time thinking about stories, plots, and internal logic, you begin to notice holes in other works. Today I was listening to “Funky Cold Medina” by Tone Loc. I must have heard that song thousands of times before. Yet I heard something today I never noticed before that disturbed me greatly: A huge, honking flaw in the logic of the song.

For those that might not have the song memorized, it starts off with Tone Loc getting no action in a bar while all the women are after a ‘no-name chump.’ Tone talks to the chump, who tells Tone that the women are after him because he has slipped them some Funky Cold Medina. Loc then gets some himself, plying several women with it with comical results.

No, the problem is not the dubious ethics of slipping women something to make them want you. The problem is that Funky Cold Medina cannot possibly work as described: How does it make women want the chump in particular, instead of just getting the women ready for any man? If it just made women randy, the women at the bar would have been after Tone too from the get-go. In the rest of the song, the FCM just drives women wild, so why not in the bar?

I realize I am over-analyzing an old 80s hip-hop song. That is not the point. The point is that this is what thinking about writing a lot gets you. The simple joy of a catchy tune eludes you while you dissect every line. You end up analyzing Tone Loc the same way you analyze Allen Ginsberg. Crazy. Oh well. At least I can still listen to “Wild Thing.”