Normally I write about very serious brow crunching subjects, such as the death of Jade Goody. This one is going to be different, it’ll be the first time I’ve actually written about a subject that is close to my heart and in particular, two of the most incredible facts you will ever know. That in itself is a fact. This is a guarantee.

As befitting a person trying to make small waves within the world of paid writing, I am a huge fan of wordplay, in all of its forms. Apart from poetry. Poetry has been proven to be not only an accelerator for mental retardation, but is also behind the wildfire like spread of Aids in the 1980s.

That may be an overstatement and a vaguely clever way of questioning the sexuality of poetry, but the fact remains that poetry is undeniably Gay.

Anyway, I love playing with words, finding similes for describing similes, trying to find similes that work as metaphors (and finding none as the whole endeavour is paradoxical) and so on. I can listen to wordsmith’s tinkle their syntax until cows and other bovine creatures come home, so much so that my top three dinner guests if death was an irrelevance would be Churchill, Wilde and Eminem.

I’d have to sit Churchill between Wilde and Eminem, obviously. The homophobe and the homophile would be unlikely to pass the bread basket and olive oil to one another.

Bread baskets, unlike poetry, are not Gay.

My fascination with language, both lingually and in transcription (along with a childhood life in Hackney) led me to hip hop. I listened to tunes with a pad and pen, wearing out the rewind buttons of numerous stereo’s just so I could catch the final couplet of Cappadonna’s verse in ‘Winter Warz’ (if you don’t know about that verse, get busy). I was introduced to Black militancy and the nation of Islam through the words of Chuck D, which as a white boy growing up in London was of vital importance. It could be compared to ensuring a paraplegic has a good hurdling technique but I found great value in it none the less.

Right, I think I have my nails coloured to my mast; (another little fav of mine, playing around with sayings to create a nonsensical sentence, try it when you’re bored and see what you come up with, then tell me what you’ve come up with) I LOVE HIP HOP. For anyone who feels similarly then sit down, because here comes the first of my fantastic facts.

Cliff Richard invented hip hop.

Yes he did, he did. He really did.

The man who went on a summer holiday and had no worries for a week or two created the genre that gave us the drink driving of gin along a public highway, whilst smoking bushes of medical benefit yet legal intolerance. But where is the evidence to back up this rumour I hear you all scream. Well….

In a nutshell, DJ Kool Herc was the world’s first hip hop DJ, the first break he ever played was a cover of the Shadows hit ‘apache’. The main part he used was the bongo breakdown, which was played by none other than…

Sir Cliff bloody Richard.

Give him a little round of applause please as we move onto the next fantastic fact.

During the mid 90’s, the one stand out record label in hip hop was Death Row Records, the label founded by a former gang banging ex security guard to Vanilla Ice, Suge Knight. Death Row was the epitome of the much criticised ‘gangsta rap’ (a label I hate, but one that’ll have to do) sub genre of hip hop, exemplified by Snoop doggy dogg, Tupac, Dr Dre etc. Every album that Death row records released from their inception in at the start of the decade up past the death of Tupac went platinum, at least, a stunning achievement. Death Row was allegedly founded from money gained from Vanilla ice.

I say gained, I suppose what I mean to say is that –allegedly- Vanilla ice was hung out of a 10 storey hotel window by the ankles until he signed over royalties to ‘big Suge’. There has also been rumours that as part of ‘complicated negotiations’ Suge would force people to drink their own urine.

Basically, this label were not packaging a sanitised version of gang banging for mass public consumption, they were living it. Raw. Oh baby did they like it raw.

This is where the pun of this blogs headline comes into play. Because in 1995, shortly after becoming a minister and being declared bankrupt, Death Row records signed none other than the chief adversary of Vanilla, Mc Hammer.

I almost want to finish the piece on that bombshell, because I can think of no better ending.

Unsurprisingly the album that was recorded never saw the light of day, although you can download it if you use a search engine and the unlikely phrase ‘Mc Hammer album on death row’.

It just goes to show, if Cliff Richard can be the ultimate mack daddy that makes us jump, jump, and if Mr ‘please Hammer don’t hurt them’ can sign to a label that does pretty much the opposite of not hurting them, then perhaps my idea of getting the Pharcyde to cover ‘boy named Sue’ by Johnny Cash is not such a crazy idea after all.