19 July 1998
A bit like ‘The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)’, ‘Ghetto Supastar (That Is What You Are)’ is a movie promotional single that completely outgrew the quickly-forgotten source movie, as well as also having a (pointless) (subtitle) (in) (brackets). It’s hip hop grafted onto a country song written by the Bee Gees: yet another ’90s number one where rap or hip hop is watered down and commercialised for a white mainstream audience. But then Bulworth, as far as I can discern, is about a white middle-aged US politician who starts behaving like a stereotypical young Black man, so it doesn’t sound as if cultural sensitivity was a high priority here.
Anyway, let’s humour Big Music and listen to ‘Ghetto Supastar’ as just your ordinary, everyday million-dollar marketing collateral. Pras, as heard with The Fugees, is not a rapper of note: his delivery is dour and his rhymes are laborious. He scans the names Solomon and Pelé as if he’s ordering off a menu in a foreign language to a foreign waiter. Ol’ Dirty Bastard, who only appears on this record because he turned up in the wrong studio and stayed for the session, is somehow made to sound dull and boring, which defies logic and physics. I suppose they were never going to let Ol’ Dirty cut loose on a big-budget Hollywood soundtrack, but then why bother having him? A useful bit of rap cred that literally walked in off the street?
Mya’s sweet, bubbling voice is the only element here worth lauding. For all the movie marketing muscle and comforting classic-hits familiarity, she’s the one who single-handedly makes ‘Ghetto Supastar’ a radio and chart hit. We’ll see and hear Mya again on another megabucks movie soundtrack chart-topper, this time one which presents four female artists as stylised bordello madames. How do these Hollywood marketing johnnies do it?
