MENTALI-T!: “If you want to polish your relationship and make it glisten/All you really have to do is learn to listen!” |
I would have begun this column by declaring that it’s impossible not to like Mr. T — his meaty good cheer, his pantomime gruffness — were it not that my wife seems to find it quite easy. T turns her right off for some reason: she won’t watch him. But my Mrs. is surely in the minority: just look how pleased everybody is to see T in his reality show Pity the Fool (TVLand, Wednesdays). “I like your sincerity, Mr T,” gushed a man in episode one. “I liked you from the minute I saw you on The A-Team!” Last week T went to a horse farm in New Jersey to try to straighten out some turbulent teenagers, and as he came chugging out of the bushes in his red jogging suit, he was met with a barnyard chorus of delight: hooting alpacas, shrilling swine, and the farmer himself giddily crying out, “Mis-ter TEE!”Each week T receives a letter from some distressed member of his public — a besieged mom, say, or someone working at a dysfunctional car dealership. “Dear Mr T, my husband is a big lazy slob . . . ” As he silently reads it, lips moving, we mark a deepening of the famous frown (now so thickly seamed into the T forehead it resembles a fleshy fleur-de-lis) and then it’s on with the red jogging suit and into action. Accountabili-T! Positive Mentali-T! Respect for your momma! And fine, blustery poetry: “If you want to polish your relationship and make it glisten/All you really have to do is learn to listen!” As reali-T, it’s all a bit low voltage, but I happen to enjoy it enormously when Mr T jabs his index finger at the camera and shouts, “If you just tuned in, what’s wrong with you, fool?! Show me some respect!’
The kids enrolled in Ice-T’s Rap School, over on VH1, they want respect too. Eighth-graders from poncy York Prep, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, they’re being drilled in hype, flow, attitude, etc. by the man who once rapped, “I’m a nigga on the trigger, madder than a pitbull/Just layin for a reason to pull . . . ” Race/class tensions are meat and drink to reality TV, of course, but the premise here (hip-hop hard man tutors posh kids) seemed too crude at first. Episode by episode, however, Rap School has become quite special: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie with big fat sneakers. Ice, speaking always in a bitterly emphatic gangsta monotone, as if giving instructions during a stick-up, is a warm, engaged tutor, and his students are on a voyage of self-discovery. Shy heavyweight Mary (“Missy M”) is rapping through her difficulties with soft-voiced determination: “My name is Missy M and I got problems in my life/But hey, look at me, I’m doin’ alright . . .” Carrot-topped Dodge (“Dodge City”), meanwhile, is going hoarse on the freestyle, dangerously liberated: “Yo, Ice-T’s teaching in prep school! And that ain’t cool! But he’s so washed up he hasn’t had a hit for 10 years! . . . Wait, am I allowed to insult Ice-T?”
