Loading ...The internet is a vast ocean of information, occasionally broken by small islands of pure, batshit crazy. For every brief and passing trend, every fad that passes out of the collective zeitgeist, there are literally hundreds of thousands of people who, thanks to the online connectivity, can and still do dedicate their entire lives to it. Beanie Babies? Kriss Kross? Hypercolor? Their online presences are not only still alive, but thriving. One particular fanbase and their arch-nemeses, however, manage to put the feverish, insane devotion of all the others to shame. And when you’re so crazy that you make a man who spends his every waking moment building Alf-cars stable, you know that’s saying something.
You might remember Scatman John from his hit single “Scatman (Ski Ba Bop Ba Dop Bop.)” Because this man wore a suit and spouted gibberish quickly, and because it was the ‘90s and we just didn’t really give a fuck, we decided to make him famous and then promptly forget about him. His career lived on in Japan and Germany for a time, (possibly due to the double-meaning of the term “scat” leading them to believe that he was merely a proud and jazzy Coprophiliac who shared their forbidden, disturbing love of sex-pooping,) but it soon lapsed into obscurity. Here’s one of his videos.
Nothing special, right?
Well, on Youtube that video generated 18,000 comments. Even putting aside what are by far some of the oddest spam messages ever generated:
“on December 3, 1999 scatman died and went to a better place scatland. if everone was like him the world whould be? a crime and drug free and better place. Copy and paste this if you belive Scatman John wanted a better world for us all and that his legend shall live on forever in scatland. R.I.P. Scatman John
I believe that scatman will live forever”
What you might not know, is that Scatman John was a prolific Stuttering Activist, and his hit single was actually all about overcoming his impediment. Because of this, he served as something of a folk hero to the suttering community – but even so, that number is still staggering, and you can find similar numbers on almost every single other one of his officially released videos; the comments sections of which are likewise populated with this very same over-zealous, deity-like level of devotion. Here’s just one example, apparently typed up by somebody from a country where they charge for internet access by the letter:
“if i had thers wishes it would be scat man to come back and second he could live forver third i wish ppl wouldnt make fun of him and if they do il slpa them scat man i got? ur back ill go to ur grave adn wacth it evrey day ur the best R.I.P scatman u will be missed hint: ur the best plz god make him come back”
This is nothing, however, when compared to another aspect of his fanbase: The truly hard-core fans who have taken a concept present in a few of the Scatman’s songs and decided, on a whim apparently, to believe every word of his lyrics literally. His singles “Scatman’s World,” and “Song of Scatland,” spoke of a fictional place called Scatland, where the people spoke a quirky little language and lived idyllic fairy tale lives. He then invited all of his fans to play pretend as well. It was a sweet, endearing little gesture that, again thanks to the internet, quickly grew disturbing and weird. A certain percentage of his fans now seem to believe that Scatland is a real place, and speak of the Scatman as some sort of novelty-song spouting God figure that will benevolently rule over them for all time. Again, just a small slice of this delicious Insanity Pie:
“you didn’t explain it all. His awesomeness was more than this earth can a=handle so god took him away and he was like “Your greatness will destroy heaven too!!?!?!?!” So he took? him to Scatland, the greatest land ever and the only one that can handle his aweosmeness. He rules it of course. Yeah I said he rules Scatland. Not he rules (even though he does) and it’s pretty obvious as to what I said. Scatman’s awesomeness was too great for the? earth to handle. So God killed him and took him to heaven. But his awesomeness was more than heaven could handle too. So God created a dimension for him (Scatland) and put him there. That is the only place that can handle his awesomeness. He rules scatland and spends his days scatting. Hope that worked.”
You might think that’s an isolated incident, but this theme of Scatland worship permeates every discussion board of the Scatman I could find. The fervor of his cult-like supporters, however, is neatly off-set by the other side of the spectrum: The Scat-Trolls. Again, because this is the internet, out of context comments and misunderstood lyrics have led many to believe that Scatman John was a raging racist who preached genocide and wished to cleanse the world of everything but his chosen people. These people troll Scatman boards across the internet, condemning him to hell and accusing him of everything from base racism to actual, literal murder and genocide. Here is but a small sip from their tasty box of Psycho Juice:
“im happy taht this bitch is dead. he will have fun with satan’s cock stupid ATHEIST motahfucka gay scum”
“scatman hates ALL RACES fcuk sHITMAN”
“he syas all arabic peoples are the same to him”
This hatred seems to stem from two things – first, a common misunderstanding of one his lyrics, where some people are certain that he says: “Fuck Paris, France and Tokyo, Japan / I’d like to fuck those living in Turkey and Iran.”
The actual lyric is a little less horribly offensive, and quite a bit less horribly hilarious: “The folks of Paris, France and Tokyo, Japan / Are like the folks that live in Turkey and Iran.“ The second basis for this hatred seems to come from an 1995 interview he did with the Advance for Speech Pathologists and Audiologists Magazine:
Q: What are your feelings about other stutterers that you have met?
Scatman: We stutterers are among the world’s sweetest people.
We know what humility is because we have been humiliated to death. We have experienced exactly what black people have experienced– oppression, suppression.
Now, given that’s a little…exaggerated. I personally know of no society that stole stutterers from their homes, exported them to distant continents, enslaved them for generations, and only recently, begrudgingly allowed them their civil rights – but then I’m no expert. Maybe this actually was the case in some foreign, godforsaken land – like Cleveland. Regardless, it doesn’t seem like he’s expressly trying to be racist. However, because the internet needs little reason to perpetuate erroneous beliefs, the two camps to this day rage against each other in the comments sections of most every page dedicated to the man.
So that’s the story of how, thanks to a bizarre sub-culture of the internet, this simple, harmless novelty singer is now not only widely believed to be directly akin to Super Hitler, but also worshipped as a sort of low-grade alternative Speech Impediment Messiah.
Next up, I explore the relatively common belief that Rico Suave was directly responsible for the JFK assassination, eats live dogs on a daily basis, single handedly stopped World War Two using only his greasy pectoral muscles, and tragically died for our sins – impaled and left to hang for nine days on a giant, plastic, zebra-striped cowboy hat.
Read more from Robert at his own site, I Fight Robots, where you can continue to read short essays about subjects that you have absolutely no interest in.
