Less debauched ice cream music

This is from an old NPR story from three years ago:

In New York City, summer has a theme song: the loud, distorted and high-pitched jingle of Mister Softee ice cream trucks.
But as the weather warms up, a pair of Brooklyn artists is asking whether the trucks could serve up something sweeter.
Jeffrey Lopez and Lauren Rosati are holding an online competition — called the Ice Cream Headache — to come up with a better ice cream song.
So far, they have received 40 remakes and remixes of the Mister Softee theme — ranging from a Balinese take on the song to one rendered entirely by a human beatbox.

You can listen to the finalists here.

Ice cream + music: an invitation to lechery

It's clear that, given the name of this blog, I'm not above a lame, semi-erotic ice cream pun.  However, the last decade's catalog of ice cream music is disturbingly pornographic, and always manages to bring race into the mix as well.  Here are some lyrics from one example, "Ice Cream Man" by Nicki Minaj:

Can i lick your, can i lick your icecreamcone

Do it like E.T. i make a ni–a phone home

 I really like vanilla, but my favorite color chocolate

chocolate, chocolate, gargle it and gargle it

and then later:

Just put a lot of nuts, imma lick it off the tip

Am I the only one blushing?

=    ?

I remember when my best friend Sofia and I first heard Wu-Tang Clan's "Ice Cream," she was extremely keen on it because she got a shout-out as a "butta pecan 'Rican" (she was half Puerto Rican).  I was bummed because there was no lychee flavor shout-out or green tea or whatever I thought a half Chinese person deserved (although a "colored Asian" features in the video and lyrics).  It is also an excellent song, although the use of ice cream flavors as a racially exclusionary rhetorical device is at best questionable.  Of course, at the time, we were all of twelve so these questions weren't weighing too heavily.  But in retrospect, I find the overt sexualization of an innocent treat to be pretty questionable; as I reported in last week's roundup of ice cream news, it's not beyond the realm of the possible for the ice cream man to have his eye (or his hands) on little kids.

Apparently this tradition dates back several decades.  In 1975, "Hokey Pokey (the Ice Cream Song)" was released by Richard Thompson.  Its lyrics include the following:

Girl on the corner with the tight dress on

You know she don’t know nothing so fine

Feels so good when you put it in your mouth

Sends a shiver all down your spine

Sends a shiver all down your spine

In retrospect, these are pretty tame.   But still!