Criminal Justice (song parody)

One of my dad’s favorite songs when I was a kid was a cross-over Latin number by the Joe Cuba Sextet called, “Bang! Bang!”. Basically a nonsense song punctuated by the band yelling “Bang! Bang!” in the chorus, the song is one of those can’t-get-it-out-of-your-head jobbies, so I decided to use it to tell a nastily satirical tale about criminal justice in New York at the time.
Okay, it does have a racist tinge to it, but this was post-Koch NYC, where every subway car was a kandinsky and every street at night was a film noir. (The “turn `em loose Bruce” line is a reference to an actual judge who had the reputation – at least amongst white non-liberals – as the kind of jurist who sided with criminals and, therefore, put them through a revolving door. The non-white left side saw him as an advocate for system reform.) Anyway, that’s a lot of sociology for a silly song that, to my recollection, is not based on any specific case of parental negligence.

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The Bagel Boat Song (song parody)

The Bagel Boat Song was written in the tradition of Mickey Katz and Allan Sherman’ s Jewish novelty songs, making room for the occasional new verse and scuttled old verse, depending on the age of the audience (e.g., Levitz used to be a furniture store. Gefilte fish used to be fish. Sort of.).

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La-La Land (song parody)

This is a song parody written to enter a contest sponsored by the Howard Stern radio program. The winner would receive an all-expense-paid trip to Los Angeles to watch a special Oscar Week of the Stern show there. I didn’t win, but the song survives.

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