The Blindboy Podcast - How Wu Tang Clan and Margaret Thatcher created the modern Ice Cream Cone

Episode Date: August 3, 2022

Boiling hot take food podcast. How Wu Tang Clan and Margaret Thatcher created the contemporary Ice Cream Cone. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Pull up your woolly pants you nudie hoolahans. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. I hope you've been having a bammy week. The ether has been bammy. It's hot and bothered. The air is pregnant. It's just that hot, sticky weather. That hot, sticky weather where you can feel a thunderstorm.

I kind of like it to be honest especially at night time it's hot, warm, overcast you can feel the pressure of the humidity around you but at night time it's cool it's like you can drink the air because there's so much water in it and you can smell the storm coming

and you can feel the electricity on your skin and that's why it feels like pregnant weather. The weather is pregnant with the violence of electricity and when the sky does crack with lightning I'd be looking off into the distance because every year without fail lightning hits some poor cunt of a sheep or a cow and kills him stone dead which is lousy because I'm sure if those sheep or cows had a way of getting out of the lightning they would

but they're just there in the middle of this vast expanse of pasture land they just have to stand around in the field as involuntary ruminant lightning rods. Actually if you are responsible for cows can you please install some type of lightning protection for the poor cows?

Even though someone's going to eat them I just think it's unfair that cows get hit by lightning. Like I know one thing that farmers are supposed to do is to put fences around their trees. Because the cattle can sense lightning and when they do they go underneath a tree for shelter. But then the tree ends up drawing the lightning towards them.

So you're supposed to construct a shelter that they can go into. And for that shelter then to be protected from lightning. But we haven't had a lightning storm yet. The other night I was anticipating a lightning storm. I was drinking tea out my back garden and it was in the evening and I could feel a lightning storm coming. You can smell it and you can feel it on your skin. I was waiting for it but it never came. And while I was listening for thunder I heard the familiar jingle of an ice cream van which is a beautiful sensation

because it takes you back to the excitement of childhood and they've never fucked with the jingles, it's the same jingle all the time since when I was a kid so I heard that jingle and almost involuntarily

my muscles jolted to run toward the ice cream van to go fuck it the ice cream van is here there's only a small window of ice cream he's in my neighbourhood I need to go to the ice cream van but I was reluctant because I was also expecting lightning

but then I thought fuck it that'd be a good way to die. Hit by lightning queuing for an ice cream. I'll take that. And also, it was the first ice cream van I'd heard in nearly two years because the ice cream man stopped coming around during the pandemic. So I went out to the ice cream van and I got myself a 99, the pandemic so I went out to the ice cream van and I got myself a 99 which is soft serve ice cream in a way for cone with a single stick of chocolate flake now even though it's called a 99 because they used to be 99p it was two euros but I didn't mind also do you know the way Americans have these alcoholic drinks

that are kind of insensitive to Irish people like they have a shot called an Irish car bomb and then they have a drink called a black and tan and they're completely unaware that and they think that these are Irish drinks but what's actually happened is the Americans have named Irish drinks after events in Irish history that are quite violent and traumatic. But I always thought, to get our own back, why don't we have an ice cream cone that has two flakes in it and we call it a 9-11, just to see what the yanks would think. Sometimes when I go to the ice cream van and I ask for a 99, I feel like saying, actually no, no, can I have a 911 instead, just to see if the ice cream man knows that that means I want two flakes. And I bet you they'd do it. But I love the

experience of eating an ice cream cone from an ice cream van. Because it's so unique. And it hasn't changed. Like your grandparents went to an ice cream van. And had the same experience. You hear the jingle. The same jingle that it's always been. You go to the ice cream van. And you get a soft serve ice cream.

What makes it so special is. you can't do that at home. You can't buy soft serve ice cream and have it in your house. Unless you want to get a soft serve ice cream machine. And no one's doing that. So the only place you can get soft serve ice cream is from a professional person selling it. You can't replicate it at home that makes the experience unique also there's a thrilling anxiety to the experience of eating soft serve ice cream that is unique to that dish and that dish only like when I heard that jingle

I did get a little pang of anxiety and it was a vestigial anxiety it was no longer relevant to me as an adult but when I was a kid you hear that fucking ice cream van and I'm a child and I don't have money you have to go to your parents and beg them for money but it's not like regular money begging you have a tiny window the fucking ice cream van is outside it's jingling ma ma ma please can i have a euro can i have a pound the ice cream van is outside please i'll do anything i'll do the dishes for two weeks i'll hover the fucking carpets i'll do anything please can i just have money for the ice cream and I need it right now and then if that doesn't work you have to open the curtains and try and shame your parents

by directing their eyes towards all the other children who are out there queuing already you have to go I can't be the one who doesn't get an ice cream I can't have all of them sitting down eating 99s and then I'm not allowed to have an ice cream now I would rarely get the ice cream money I'd get it one out of every five times because my ma viewed soft serve ice cream as extravagance why do you want to go outside to the van and get ice cream we've got ice cream in the freezer it's far from ice cream you were raised and then I'm like actually no ma it's far from ice cream you were raised but I was raised around fucking ice cream and I'd like to go out and get ice cream can I have money please

and she'd say no and then what used to happen actually I'm glad she did this because it made me appreciate ice cream more she'd say you're not going out getting an ice cream cone here's what we're going to do and then she'd go to the freezer and she'd get you know that block of ice cream that's in the cardboard tube and she'd cut a lump of it off with a bread knife

a pale wedge of vanilla ice cream that always had an itinerant piece of cardboard in it and flank it between two dry saccharine rectangles of wafer that tasted like the body and blood of Christ and she'd say eat that take this homemade ice cream bar and go out and sit beside your friends at the curb while they have their 99s and you can't do that because you get the fucking head slagged off you and my ma would do

that it's not that she couldn't afford like she had the money to go go out and get an ice cream it was the principle my ma had very strict rules around what was considered extravagant and what wasn't and the idea of getting soft ice cream from a van when there's perfectly good hard ice cream in the freezer the idea of that was extravagance and that's a treat and you can't have that every time that's a treat so the compromise that I used to do was I'm like okay I'm not gonna go out into the fucking streets with a homemade ice cream sandwich and get slagged I'm gonna stay inside I'm gonna put the rectangle of your ice cream into a bowl and then I'm gonna mush it up with a fork until it's kind of soft like the ice cream that everyone's

eating outside but the next time the ice cream man comes around ma you have to promise that I can go out and get a 99 and then she'd go okay yeah but looking back I'm glad she did that it made me appreciate the soft serve ice cream from the van more but now I'm a grown man I'm a grown man out the back garden so I can have I can go to the fucking ice cream van as much as I like but I still get that wonderful anxiety when I heard the ice cream jingle. That wonderful anxiety and everything about the experience of eating soft serve ice cream from a van. A lot of the anxiety is because everything is time based. The fear is what if I miss the van?

What if I miss it? What if I don't get a chance? What if he drives away and that's the last ice cream van of the fucking summer? And all of this adds to the experience. All of that anxiety adds to the joy. Especially in 2022 when everything is instant. Everything is downloadable. Streamable. Thank fuck there's no Spotify for soft serve ice cream cones but here's the other parameters of anxiety that make soft serve ice cream from a van fantastic like first off if the ice cream van is out it means that it's summer and it's hot unless they're selling drugs and they're doing it in fucking September but most ice cream vans are just selling ice cream. So they do it in the summer when it's hot. So when you get your soft serve ice cream, you're racing against the meltiness.

You have to eat the ice cream quick enough so that it doesn't melt all over your hands. But not so quick that you get brain freeze. To eat soft serve ice cream, you have to straddle the precipice of pleasure and pain and when I was a kid do you know how you could tell how you could tell which child got ice cream money every time because they were the ones giving the end of their ice cream cone to a dog just to watch the dog get brain freeze and laugh at it. There was this dog his name was Jeff in my neighbourhood

he was a mongrel German pointer with Dalmatian grandparents he had a mottled polka dot Dalmatian chest and belly and one of the lads used to always give him the end of the ice cream cone because Jeff would get a brain freeze. He was an odd dog. Jeff used to Jeff would get a brain freeze. He was an odd dog.

Jeff used to he'd get a boner. We'd call it we'd call it when Jeff took out the lipstick. But Jeff Jeff used to take out the lipstick and ejaculate on the backs of children. And we didn't know what it was. We knew it wasn't piss. we didn't know what it was.

We knew it wasn't piss, but we didn't know what it was. And that's what Jeff the dog used to do. He'd mount six-year-olds and take out his lipstick. And when I was 11, I'd bought myself, like, 36 eggs for Halloween, for throwing at buses. And I had them hidden in my bedroom and then my ma found him

she found 36 eggs and was like I know what you're going to do with these eggs it's not happening but the eggs were pure gone off because if you were a child like in Limerick if you were a child you couldn't buy eggs in October it was too close to Halloween

the shopkeeper knew what you were doing so you had to buy your eggs in September. So I had 36 eggs silently rotting in my sock drawer. But even though they were gone off, my ma wasn't going to throw them out because that would be extravagant. So she got all 36 eggs and put them in a frying pan and made like a five inch omelette and then fed it to Jeff the dog the

canine lipstick half dalmatian ejaculator but I've been thinking about soft serve ice cream and ice cream vans all week to the point that I knew I would have to do this week's podcast on ice cream and ice cream vans and to go into a deep dive a deep research dive to see what I can find and it led me down quite a bizarre trail ice cream began as quite an exclusive fancy food

there's examples of foodstuffs that are similar to ice cream being used historically in the Middle East in ancient Rome, in China. But what we call modern ice cream is very much an American thing. It starts off in New York in the 1700s. The first ice cream parlour was opened up in 1776 and this would have been an exclusive expensive food because in the 1700s

refrigeration didn't exist. If you wanted ice ice had to be physically brought from places in the world that were cold. So getting cream and sugar and freezing it in the 1700s that was some fancy shit.

So only rich people had access to ice cream. But by the mid-1800s, ice cream became a commonly available working class food. Specifically on the streets of New York, for labourers who were very hot from working all day and the weather is hot. So little carts started to appear in the streets where vendors were able to serve ice cream in these little carts.

These carts were often run by quite poor Italian immigrants because Italians had a tradition of shaved flavoured ice and also of course gelato which is a type of ice cream. So you'd have all these Italian lads going around with little carts that they used to push around by hand serving people ice that was shaved off a block or actual ice cream. Now what allowed ice cream to be made in these little carts was the use of salt. So the vendors would get ice but they'd also mix salt with the ice and what the salt would do is it would actually lower the temperature of the ice to make it really, really cold.

And then on this they'd have like a metal bowl where they'd put in cream and sugar and a bit of vanilla flavouring and then they would make ice cream there and then. Labourers would buy little bowls of ice cream that they would lick. They wouldn't even have a spoon and then they'd hand that bowl back to be wiped down and the next person got it. But eating ice cream in New York in the mid-1800s was actually quite dangerous. The milk and cream that was being used wasn't pasteurized. It was raw milk. So people were getting diphtheria, scarlet fever, tuberculosis just from eating the ice cream. They used to blame the vanilla flavoring and all this

shit but it's like no they were eating unsafe dairy products that hadn't been pasteurized which is it's a way of fucking hating milk so that the bacteria is killed i think your man louis pastor invented it and that's why it's called pasteurization but this ice cream that was being served it was like regular ice cream it was the ice cream that my ma was giving me from the freezer. It wasn't that soft served, unique ice cream. So where did that start? Well there's multiple competing bizarre theories as to how soft serve ice cream started and all of them have a bizarre conspiracy theory around them. The first is that there was an ice cream vendor in 1929. Now he had an ice cream truck at this point. It wasn't a cart anymore but his name was Thomas Caravello. He was an immigrant and he used to drive around in his ice cream van selling people ice cream on the side of the road to labourers. But one day he got a flat tyre and he didn't have a refrigerated truck. He just had an ice cream truck that had ice in it.

So he's like, fuck, I've got a flat tire. I can't move anywhere and it's hot. The ice is melting and the ice cream is melting. So he began selling on this day, the ice cream that was kind of half melty. And as it was melting, he started whipping it up and serving people this softer whipped ice cream in a bowl. And everyone fucking loved it.

They're like this is amazing. This is actually nicer than the hard ice cream. Cues formed. So he decided. Fuck that I'm doing this every day. So every day. Instead of driving around with hard ice cream. He stuck his truck in one place. let the ice cream kind of half melt and served people soft melty ice cream. So him and his

brother figured out fuck it people love this soft ice cream. So they went about building special machines that kept ice cream in a perpetual state of softness that could be pumped out. The business Carville Ice Cream was born and some people credit him with inventing soft serve ice cream. He started about 500 locations and became like the McDonald's of fucking ice cream. He amassed millions and millions and millions of dollars, a huge fortune. But in 1990, at a very old age, he died suddenly in his sleep. But he died with suspicion that some of his close employees were actually embezzling money from him and scheming against him. On the day of his funeral, his own attorney hired a locksmith to break into his house to try and find his will. It all looks a bit dodgy. Then suddenly 20 years later in 2009, Carvello's niece Pamela all of a sudden demands that his body is exhumed. His niece Pamela claimed that Tom was actually

murdered or drugged in his sleep and she wanted to dig up his body to find out because she believes she's entitled to the vast fortune of 67 million dollars. It was thrown out of court but she put herself into personal bankruptcy trying to prove that he was murdered. She never paid her debt and to this day his niece is living as a fugitive. No one knows where she is. Now the other company who claim to have invented soft serve ice cream are known as the Taylor company. They claim to have invented soft serve ice cream in 1926 and to have invented the machines that make it. But what the Taylor company did do is they managed to get the contract with McDonald's to make all of McDonald's milkshake machines and ice cream machines. And to this day, every McDonald's in the world contains a Taylor ice cream machine.

But there's a very bizarre conspiracy theory around this. So people started to notice in McDonald's all around the world. in McDonald's is all around the world when you go to a McDonald's and ask for an ice cream or a McFlurry quite a lot of the time the machine is broken and I found this myself you go into McDonald's look for a McFlurry and it's a bit of a lucky dip you never know if they're actually going to be able to give you a McFlurry ice cream or not. So apparently all Taylor ice cream machines that are in McDonald's contain quite an elaborate process to clean them. They're self cleaning but if you do it wrong and it's quite easy to do it wrong you cannot use the McDonald's ice cream machine until an official Taylor employee shows up to fix it.

And it's argued that this is a giant conspiracy that's been running since 1956. That these ice cream machines in every single McDonald's are deliberately designed to break down easily so that the Taylor company are continually repairing them and continually making money, like a type of planned obsolescence. And this is being taken very seriously. In 2000, they did a study and found that at any time in the world, 25% of McDonald's ice cream machines are broken. It's so suspicious that since 2021, the Federal Trade Commission in the US is actively investigating why McDonald's ice cream machines break down so much.

There may be a conspiracy at play. And then the third theory as to who invented soft serve ice cream. And this is the most fucking batshit mad theory of all. So what is true is that the soft serve ice cream that you and I eat today was pioneered by a British company called Mr. Whippy in the 1950s. Now what Mr. Whippy did is they made our ice cream a little bit shitter. They asked the question, how can we make soft serve ice cream that costs us less money. Well, they figured, let's invent a machine that pumps soft serve ice cream with a lot of air. So the soft serve ice cream that you and I have today,

it's not 100% ice cream. There's quite a lot of air pumped into it to kind of fluff it up like whipped cream. And that obviously saves the ice cream companies more money because they're selling us air. Think of it like a donut. A donut could simply just be a bun. But no, someone figured out, let's take out the middle.

And whoever figured that out saved a lot of money. Because they're using less dough. While our soft serve ice cream today contains a lot of fucking air. This was pioneered by Mr. Whippy in the 1950s. Apparently this was made possible by a young chemist who was working with Mr. Whippy called Margaret fucking Thatcher. Yes, the Margaret Thatcher.

That Margaret Thatcher. The union buster who became fucking Prime Minister of Britain. In the 1950s, before Margaret Thatcher studied law she studied as a chemist. She worked with Mr. Whippy on their soft serve ice cream program. And what did she do? In typical

Thatcher bullshit she filled her fucking soft serve ice cream full of air so that greedy corporate ice cream magnates can make more money while we're left on the side of the curb using airy ice cream magnates can make more money but we're left on the side of the curb using airy ice cream

to give brain freeze to a dog who comes on children. In 1983 she was inducted into the Royal Society of Scientists because of it. Now it's one of these things where it's like look she was just out of fucking school lads.

Was she really instrumental in making our ice cream more airy or is it just fluff? Is it just mythology that helps Mr Whippy the company for their branding and makes Margaret Thatcher look brilliant? But yeah that's what Thatcher did before she destroyed the working class of Britain. She modernized soft serve ice cream for the worse. But I'd like to explore now what I really want to get into. The experience of buying ice cream from an ice cream truck

it's not just about the ice cream. It's also about the experience of the truck itself and the music that the truck is playing. And this is where the Irish kind of come into it. From what I can see at every point in the history of soft serve ice cream trucks, whenever an Irish emigrant gets involved, something absolutely terrible happens. Here's one example.

The ice cream truck industry often, not often, but sometimes intersects with organized crime ice cream trucks aren't a franchise and there's not really any denoted territory so sometimes when ice cream vans are just doing their thing they find themselves feuding sometimes violently with rival ice cream sellers because there's no rules and they're like don't be selling ice cream on my street this is my street who says it's your street do you have a fucking permit that says it's your street

no I say it's my street like two years ago a documentary maker from Dublin I think called Ross Killeen he made a documentary a short documentary called 99 Problems about ice cream sellers in Dublin who are simply selling ice cream but they find themselves effectively being physically intimidated

and being involved in something which sounds a lot closer to gang warfare even though it's ice cream that's being sold. Like here's one quote from a Dublin ice cream seller who's speaking about rival ice cream vans. I've had cars burnt out. I've had people parked outside my house when my kids were at home. I've had people linking me with the IRA. My throat was threatened to be cut.

I've been followed constantly for years. And they're just selling ice cream. Also as well. Now this happened in Dublin. It definitely happened in Limerick. Sometimes ice cream vans just sell drugs. You won't see it often. But I've definitely seen it.

Or you look at the ice cream van. It's playing the tune. And the people queuing up. Are grown adults. Who definitely don't want ice cream. Now this got particularly bad in Glasgow in the 1980s. They had the Glasgow ice cream van wars which was an all-out bloody gang war where multiple people were murdered because Glasgow gangs decided to use ice cream vans as

a way to distribute and sell drugs. Ice cream vans were being used in drive-by shootings and lots of innocent blood was spilled because it's just not a good idea for ice cream vans to be used as part of a gang war. Now I'm going to have an ocarina pause right now because in the second part of this podcast I want to focus on the music that ice cream trucks play and my research into this was absolutely fascinating and I don't want to interrupt it so let's have a little ocarina pause right now I'm in my office, I'm not in my studio

so I don't have the ocarina but I do have my Puerto Rican Guero from the Bronx which I'm going to play with my keys, specifically my Puerto Rican Guero from the Bronx, which I'm going to play with. My keys, specifically the little fob that I use to access my gym. And you're going to hear an advert for something right here. Acast are going to digitally insert an advert for something. On April 5th, you must be very careful, Margaret.

It's a girl. Witness the birth. Bad things will start to happen. Evil things of evil. It's all for you. No, no, don't. The first omen. I believe the girl is to be the mother. Mother of what?

Is the most terrifying. Six, six, six. It's the mark of the devil. Hey! Movie of the year. It's not real. It's not real. What's not real? Who said that?

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So back to the subject of soft serve ice cream and ice cream vans. One thing that makes the experience of eating an ice cream cone from a van unique is the music that the van plays. It's unmistakable. It's a shitty, chimey music. It's unmistakable. It's a shitty, chimey music. It reverberates around the neighbourhood with the simplicity of a nursery rhyme. They've never tried to change what Ice Cream Van all the memories you associate with ice cream vans. Ice cream vans have a couple of tunes. Yankee Doodle Dandy, The Camptown Races.

But around the world, the most common Ice Cream Van tune is this one. Now that song is called Turkey in the Straw, and that tune is a folk melody from America. Around 1810, but before that melody became associated with ice cream vans, it was actually used quite frequently in minstrel shows in America, which were incredibly racist types of entertainment that were probably the most popular type of entertainment in America in the 1800s, where white performers would wear blackface makeup, dress up like African-American people,

and then sing songs and do dances that simultaneously take from African American song and dance while also punching down and laughing at African American people. So very, very racist, an incredibly overtly racist period in American history. And that song is, that melody is deeply, deeply associated with that. That song Turkey in the Straw. Minstrel performers would use that melody and put lyrics over it and perform songs that were incredibly racist. There's two songs that I can think of, and I'm not even going to say what those songs names were incredibly racist. There's two songs that I can think of and I'm not even going to say what those songs names were because there's racial slurs in the titles of the songs but one of them poked fun at we'll say recently freed African slaves who would have lived in New

York and might have gotten a job and gotten a bit of money. And now all of a sudden they're dressing quite well and trying their best to live their lives as free people in New York. So one of these songs completely took the piss out of those people. Really punched down and mocked the idea that a freed African slave would try and participate in white society. Another one of the songs uses the N-word in the title and it just mocks African American people with every single harmful stereotype you could think of. So that song, Turkey in the Straw, that we hear in ice cream vans, the history of that song, when it finds its way to America is deeply deeply racist and is used in minstrel shows. Now I say when it came to America

because that melody is actually an Irish melody. The earliest example of that melody that I can find is from the 1700s in Ireland. It would have been a traditional Irish melody with many different names but the most popular name for it is the rose tree and it would have sounded like this. So like I said, that song there, the earliest sheet music example that I can find of that song is from the 1700s. But it's a traditional Irish melody, so it's most likely way, way older.

So how does a traditional Irish melody like that find its way in America in the 1800s and now it's being used in minstrel shows as a racist song against African American people. Well firstly something that's quite important to note whenever it comes to traditional Irish melodies. That song could be a thousand years old and quite a lot of Irish folk tunes were first written on harps. Irish harp music which is over a thousand years old is Ireland's indigenous classical music. When you read Irish mythology the harp is frequently present as the main instrument of Irish people and the kings of Ireland would have been patrons of harpists.

There's a reason that the harp is the symbol of Ireland. This was our instrument of our indigenous classical music. But in the 1500s, when Henry VIII became king of Ireland, he recognised that the harp was so culturally important to Irish people that he completely banned the harp. The harp became illegal. Literally, people who played harps would be killed. To own a harp was banned. and colonising Ireland deliberately destroyed our art and our culture as a way to eradicate our identity so that we become British subjects. So our music became lost, our indigenous classical music became lost and melodies that were written on harp found their way as folk songs that people would hum or sing or play on a fiddle.

And it's hard for us to know just how old our music is or how old our folk melodies are because so many of them were written on harps and then all of that was forgotten. Now, a melody like that, I'd be quite confident that was written on a harp. It doesn't sound like it was written on a violin. So most likely, that rose tree song that became turkey in the straw is ancient Irish harp music. Now as an interesting aside one of the

other most popular ice cream van songs is a tune called Green Sleeves. Now this is quite popular in British ice cream vans and Green Sleeves apparently was written by Henry VIII himself because he fancied himself as a musician. Now that's bullshit, that's a myth. Henry VIII did not write Greensleeves. He was a narcissistic bollocks and he probably took it for himself and told people he did. And sometimes I wonder, considering that Henry VIII was a wannabe musician,

was there begrudgery and jealousy in him banning harp music in Ireland. Was he jealous of the harp players of Ireland? But anyway, that melody, the rose tree, became present in Irish folk music. We didn't lose all our melodies from harp music. We kept a lot of them through folk song. And this folk song, this folk melody, via Irish immigration to the poorest parts of New York in the 1700s and the 1800s, made its way to New York. And it's very frustrating that it becomes a racist song that's used in minstrel shows, because Irish music was banned. It was banned because of systemic racism and colonialism. Henry VIII taking over Ireland and banning the music of a culture is systemic racism.

Therefore, any melody that survives beyond that banning immediately becomes political, it immediately becomes anti-racist and it immediately becomes anti-colonial because it exists despite systemic attempts to eradicate culture so it's very fucking frustrating that it becomes recontextualized in new york as a tool of racism and i've spoken about this before i've done a couple of podcasts on this but when irish immigrants first started to arrive in North America from 1600-1700 right up into the mid-1800s, Irish people were not considered white. Even though they had white skin, Irish people were not considered white people.

And Irish people lived alongside freed African slaves in slum areas of New York, like the Five Points. And what happened in the 1600s and the 1700s in particular, Irish people and African American people lived together and culture amalgamated. 1800s, especially at the outbreak of the American Civil War, Irish people, Irish immigrants, Irish Americans began to violently turn on their African American neighbours via racism and lynching as a way to attain whiteness in the eyes of the American middle and upper classes who were effectively British and Dutch immigrants and a huge amount of early minstrel performers. Performers who would, white people who would wear black face and pretend to be black people on stage. A lot of those minstrels were Irish people because they lived alongside African American people in New York. There was cultural exchange, like tap dancing, which is something that was present in minstrel acts. Tap dancing is a mixture between African dancing and Irish dancing.

would perform as black people on stage because A, they were the group that had the closest physical proximity to black people. They were living in the same neighbourhood as them. And by enacting violence against African Americans and enacting racism against African Americans, it was how Irish Americans attained whiteness, attained status within the racism of American society. It was like appealing to the middle class American audiences that came to minstrel shows by saying, we're not like African Americans. Sure, aren't we taking the piss out of them? Aren't we pretending to be them aren't we making fun so

you can laugh and that's one of the horrible histories of Irish America not to mention how so many Irish Americans founded them became the police in America which is a notoriously racist institution but anyway yeah that song the rose tree which is an Irish indigenous classical song, something which was taken away and banned by the British as harp music when it got to America, ended up being interpolated, bastardised and changed and used as a weapon of racism by Irish Americans against African Americans in minstrel shows. But because minstrel shows were so fucking popular in American society, the tunes and melodies from minstrel shows naturally became what started to be used in the first ice cream vans.

And I'm talking about 1916 here, early ice cream vans in New York started to use the pop songs of the day as a way to attract people to their vans to come and get ice cream. But those tunes never went away. We're still, to this day, an ice cream van can come down my fucking neighbourhood and it's playing a racist minstrel song

from the fucking 1800s because it never changed and I think the reason it never changes the reason ice cream vans don't change their music is because they rely so heavily upon nostalgia you're not just selling ice cream to kids you're selling ice cream to people who used to be kids so why is that song still being played today? Why are ice cream bands today still playing a song that has quite an offensive history? Even though it's just a fucking melody, we know historically where that melody comes from, and it shouldn't really still be used to just sell ice cream.

But this is where it takes a fucking, another bizarre turn. I'm a huge fan of a rap group called the Wu-Tang Clan I have been since I was a fucking kid I love Wu-Tang and the producer of Wu-Tang the one who makes the music who makes the beats

is a fella called RZA an absolute genius someone who changed the shape of rap music, someone who would have inspired what fucking Kanye West is doing now, like Kanye West's whole sound comes from RZA's sound from the Wu-Tang Clan. And the Wu-Tang even have a song called Ice Cream from 1995 on Ray Kwan's album called Only Built for Cuban Links, which is one of the best rap albums ever released and the song Ice Cream is an absolute fucking banger.

So about a year ago I just went onto Spotify and I was checking Jesus I wonder has RZA released any new music recently and I saw that he'd uploaded a song called Ice Cream Jingle and I'm like what the fuck? So I click on it and I play it and it's a literal ice cream jingle it's not RZA from Wu-Tang doing a fucking banging hip-hop track he's after uploading an ice cream jingle to Spotify so I'm like what the fuck I gotta check this out so it turns out RZA from Wu-Tang also had a problem with the fact that this song,

Turkey in the Straw, which he grew up hearing on ice cream vans, he ended up looking into the history and realizing, holy fuck, this song that I've heard all my life from ice cream vans comes from minstrel shows. This is a racist song. Why is it playing in ice cream vans comes from minstrel shows this is a racist song why is it playing in ice cream vans so RZA got in contact with an ice cream van company called Good Humor who've been operating ice cream vans in America since the 1930s and they were the ones who actually popularized

the song Turkey in the Straw to be used in ice cream vans, RZA went to him and said, we can't be fucking using this song. This song is racist. We got to do a new one. Why not let me write it? So he did. So I'll play a bit now of RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan talking about the new ice cream jingle that he's written to replace Turkey in the Straw. We wanted to make a melody that includes all communities, that's good for every driver, every kid, and I'm proud to say for the first time in a long

time, a new Ice Cream Truck Jingle will be made available to trucks all across the country in perpetuity. That means forever, you know what I mean? Like-Tang's forever so that's RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan creatively responding to an Irish

melody that might be over a thousand years old. To try and repair. The harm and racism that was done. By that melody being used in minstrel shows. Via ice cream fucking vans. Which I just absolutely fucking adore. I just love that.

As. Especially as a fan of Wu-Tang Clan. That is not something I expected to find out when I went down a deep dive rabbit hole into ice cream vans and ice cream music. So that's all I have time for this week. Ladies and gentlemen, I'll catch you next week. Possibly with a hot take. Relax. Enjoy yourself. rub a dog.

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