dr jekyll – Halloween Shindig

TRACK #398:

Hyde’s Beat by Mr. Hyde

Despite enjoying a fair amount of success, by 1987 our dynamic and heinous duo of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde had called it quits.

It was at this point that Andre Harrell went out and formed Uptown Records. Mr. Hyde, known to the government as Alonzo Brown, ultimately went on to become a screenwriter and an Emmy winning producer of The Judge Mathis show.

Before he did that however, Mr. Hyde drop one final single for Profile Records called The Witch.

Now that song has been in and out of the bullpen over the years, because it’s a bop and it’s called The Witch. Problem is, it’s not really about a witch, it’s just about a girl that kinda pissed Mr. Hyde off, which is a bummer, cause it really is a cool song.

In fairness though, most songs about witches are just men complaining about some woman that spurned them or made them feel uncomfortable by being assertive or weird. This trend gets pretty annoying when you’re just looking for spooky songs for your Halloween playlist and you keep getting served up scorned men warning you about the last female they encountered. Men, please stop this. Resist the temptation. It’s cliched and tired to use a witch metaphor in your song about a woman that wasn’t interested in you. Stop sullying up cool evil witches with all your insecure sexism.

But all of that’s not really a problem, because I’m an idiot. See, the B side of The Witch is a song called Hyde’s Beat. Now, if I wasn’t an idiot, I’d have just listened to that B side straight away instead of just assuming that it was the instrumental to The Witch. If Alonzo Brown went by any other name, I may not have jumped to such a quick conclusion, but again, I just assumed it was the dub version, cause I’m an idiot.

Once I finally listened to it, and realized this Mr. Hyde was the Mr. Hyde of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, everything feel into place. Because Hyde’s Beat appears to be the spiritual successor (if not just the direct sequel) to Transformation. It picks up immediately after “Mr. Hyde” has killed “Dr. Jekyll,” and we find Hyde in a state of disarray – confused and scared at the prospect of the dead man on the floor, a dead man he’ll surely be blamed for killing.

Toward the end of the Robert Louis Stevenson’s original story, Jekyll begins involuntarily transforming into Hyde, such that he needs the serum to turn back into Jekyll rather than the other way around. Eventually, he runs out serum though and is doomed to transform completely into Hyde once and for all and remain that way forever.

Once that happens, Edward Hyde makes the decision to take his own life. He drink some poison Jekyll has laying around the lab, effectively kill the both of them and thus ending the story.

In our song however, we have Hyde “killing” Dr. Jekyll and completely coming apart at the seams as result. Because we’re people that know Jekyll and Hyde are the same person, we can only assume that this murder is purely metaphoric and represents the point at which Hyde can no longer turn back into Jekyll, right? Yeah, I think we can. Rather than take his own life though, Mr. Hyde just jumps out of a window and into a limo with Igor, as any one of us might do in the same situation.

Naturally, all the cops in the city are now looking for him, cause he just killed Dr. Jekyll, and since Dr. Jekyll is a totally separate person, there’s definitely a body on the ground indicting murder and thus leading to an investigation where law enforcement might be looking for Jekyll curios and off-putting friend, Mr. Hyde, right? Yeah, I think that’s safe to assume.

So, Igor does what a buddy might do, and he brings Hyde to a bar so he can lay low for a while. Unfortunately, everyone at the bar freaks out when they see Hyde and high-tails it outta there. But then, all of sudden its morning and Hyde is waking up next to a woman like he’s Jekyll again but has been dickin’ down all night like Mr. Hyde. Only he’s still Mr. Hyde, and she’s not really feeling that, so he jumps out of another window cause why not. Doors are for pussy. Get with it.

Then basically he just becomes homeless, wandering the city streets alone and shunned, proclaiming to whomever will listen that he didn’t kill Dr. Jekyll, which shouldn’t be a problem, because there’s no body, and everyone’s just like “Hey, where did Dr. Jekyll go,” right? I mean, if they’ve even noticed. Jekyll hasn’t even been dead a whole day yet, is anyone really looking suspecting foul play yet? Is this all just some delusion Hyde is spiraling into as he’s lays dying from the poison he drank in the lab? Is this thing coming at it all from an angle I hadn’t consider yet? Who knows.

Eventually though, Hyde comes to the realization that Jekyll being dead is actually kind of liberating and hopefully our humble narrator finally finds some peace. I sure hope so. He seems pretty distressed through most of this song. Or maybe his cries of “I’m free!” are his last words as he chokes on his own breath, dying on the floor of the laboratory. Who knows?

So yeah, it kinda deviates from the story a little, but there are references to Billy Dee Williams and Thriller and even Rodney Dangerfield, so that kinda re-centers things a bit back toward the original text.

So here’s Mr. Hyde, on his own at last, living his best life and rockin’ a beat that is truly his own.

TRACK #397:

Transformation by Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde

So, The Phantom of the Opera, The 3-D Invisibles, what else can we toss on the “you’ve been doing this for how long and you still haven’t talked about” pile?

Well, how bout Jekyll and Hyde? There’s a classic gothic horror staple that hasn’t gotten but maybe a passing mention here in the most fleeting of monster party verses. And even that I’m not 100% on.

So, let’s put a little mustard on it then, shall we? Instead of adding just any old song about Jekyll and Hyde, how about one from a pair of dudes that actually named themselves Jeckyll and Hyde, spelling notwithstanding.

The 80’s electo rap duo Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde have been on the Shindig’s radar for some time now. How could they not be? They’re an electro rap duo called Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde. They’ve had a few songs in the bullpen for a while at this point. They’ve been waiting patiently.

They’ve also been pretty influential. In addition to being the first guys to sample the ridiculously sampled Genius of Love by Tom Tom Club, Dr. Jeckyll is actually Andre Harrell, the founder of Uptown Records. How’s that for crazy?

I love that monsters songs always seem to hiding in the closets of some of the movers and shakers in music. Call them novelties. Call them silly and unserious. Call them completely inconsequential in the grand breadth of musical history, because maybe they are. But you can not say that The Shindig does not boast among it’s ranks some of the most influential, popular and talented musicians, performers and producers the business had to offer, even if the songs represented here are not the pinnacle of those same artists careers.

But I digress.

Despite dropping their first single in 1980 (and then later a weird doo-wop style throwback mashup called Jeckyll and Hyde Dance that wasn’t terribly referential) it took 6 years for these guys to release a song about the men who gave them their names. But when they did, man did they unleash a doozy.

And that doozy was 1986’s Transformation, one hell of Golden Age Monster Rap that indulges in the clever gimmick of having each rapper assume their respective namesakes in alternating verses. Perhaps that’s the obvious choice, but a wise one never the less, and one that pays off for this fun modernization of the Jekyll and Hyde story, or at least the generally held notion of the Jekyll and Hyde story, anyway. Cause Jekyll and Hyde is kind of a…strange case…of apparent misunderstanding.

First and foremost, let’s look at the concrete stuff. The 1866 novella by Robert Louis Stevenson is a mystery that doesn’t so much focus on Jekyll had Hyde directly, as the story is mostly told through other characters reacting to the various actions of Jekyll and Hyde. Additionally, the reader is never really privy to Hyde’s actions directly. In the end, it is revealed that Dr. Jekyll was in fact Mr. Hyde the whole time and it is played as a surprise ending.

Now, that’s kind of a boring prospect for a moving picture though, I reckon, so Hollywood Hollywooded it up by focusing directly on the two titular characters, in particular Edward Hyde and the visualization of their transformation. Which is an interesting distinction. Most every adaptation plays with the idea the Dr. Jekyll is consumed by Mr. Hyde and then, like a werewolf almost, awakens the next day without any memory of what Hyde has done. The implication that Hyde is someone different and is no longer Dr. Jekyll. But this isn’t really what happens in the story, not expressly.

Dr. Jekyll does indeed transform into Mr. Hyde, but not in this somewhat metaphoric sense. Edward Hyde isn’t a separate person with conflicting goals and desires. Edward Hyde is Henry Jekyll. The Doctor does transform into Hyde, yes, but in the most literal sense, like Henry is wearing a Hyde costume. The serum changes Jekyll’s appearance, and that change (much like the Invisible Man) allows him walk unrecognized in the night, free to act upon his otherwise repressed desires, whatever they may be. Jekyll and Hyde isn’t a tale of a man with split personality disorder, it’s the tale a doctor inventing a physical mask as cover for his hedonistic desires.

Which brings us to another curious point about this story and its adaptations. Since we never really get to see Hyde doing what Hyde be doing, the reader is left to the second hand descriptions of his activies by Jekyll; activities that Jekyll is even reluctant to fully reveal on his deathbed, so there’s that. You’re a murder man, what else could you still be trying to…hyde? And why?

As such, many have taken to a queer reading of the story, with Hyde being an expression of Jekyll’s repressed Victorian homosexuality. To wit, there is practically no women in the story, it’s all a bunch of interpersonal relationships between these dudes. Homosexuality had been broadly criminalized in London the year before the story was released, and apparently Hyde Park was a a popular destination for homosexual rendezvous. Some of Stevenson’s close friends, including a former Reverend (curiously named Walter Jekyll,) were homosexuals themselves. One such friend wrote to Robert after reading the story, expressing his opinion that when viewed allegorically, (to borrow a modern phrase) it hit different.

There is this funny SNL skit with Bill Hader that (whether intentional or not) is in ways perhaps a more accurate adaptation on both accounts. Not only is Jekyll openly admitting to having sex with men after he takes the “serum,” but that he, despite claiming he doesn’t remember what is happening as Hyde…clearly remembers what is happening as Hyde. Indeed it is the reason he “invents” the “serum” to begin with – to provide cover for these acts to his wife and colleagues, as he can offload those desires directly onto “Hyde.”

Was this a widely held opinion of the story in the day? Was old time Hollywood aware of such an interpretation? Is that why Hyde was initially (and henceforth) always seen cavorting with female prostitutes, despite the fact that Mr. Hyde neither encounters, nor murders any prostitutes in Stevenson’s original story. Was it an attempt to redirect the story and reassert the character as unflinchingly heterosexual, lest anyone gets any untoward ideas? Who knows?

But where am I now? I was talking about this song, and now I’ve wandered dangerously far off course from this highly detailed account of a Dr. Jekyll just wanting to wear Timberland boots and embrace Hyde’s primal heterosexual trysts.

Let’s get back to this song that doesn’t concern itself with how Hyde should be interpreted, and certainly doesn’t have any patience for a queer reading of the text.

Here’s the duo themselves, Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde singing about their very specific predicament in the 80’s Monster Rap epic Transformation.

Let me show you this freaky side!