Word: funke
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Originating in the South Bronx in the mid-'70s, rap music is a cultural anthropologist's mother lode. It combines musical influences as disparate as disco, George Clinton funk, conventional R & B and Ennio Morricone scores for Italian westerns, cross-pollinates them with the Jamaican disc jockey's art of "toasting" (talking over the instrumental breaks in records) and a street kid's fondness for boasting, synthesizes the results with some distinctly contemporary audio technology and winds up with a sound that invites deejays at local dance palaces to "scratch" the surface. The deejays...
...mall rats" has grown up now, but some of them seem at times reluctant to leave the familiar comfort of the mall to enter adult society. For instance, the Washington Post recently ran a story that centered on one of the denizens of the bazaar in particular, one Douglas Funk...
...Funk spends all day and all evening hanging around the mall. The patriarch of the rat community, he boasts that he "has been her through about three generations of mall rats." Apparently pleasant though somewhat passive, he understands his situation, but can't muster up enough energy to do anything about it, saying, "I'm unemployed and I really don't have anything else to do or anywhere else to go, because of my lifestyle...
...Funk leads his compatriots in apathy on their listless rounds through the mall, from arcade to pizza parlor to benches in the main thoroughfares of the mall. When they are bored, they watch television in one of the mall's appliance stores; when they are tired they rest on the couches in the furniture department at Montgomery Ward's oblivious to the shoppers inspecting their restingplaces...
...meager dreams of Funk, and his fellow rats, might seen ludicrous, but they are not to be laughed at. Perhaps Funk is the progenitor of the next evolutionary stage of mankind--Home Mallus, a deevolved species whose horizons are no longer than the distance from Woolworth's to Orange Julius...