It’s Halloween. You had a costume party to attend. You’re strapped for cash and you need a costume. So you dig through your pile of snapbacks, brightly colored skinnys, and cartoon character belt buckles for the costume you wore last year. You dust it off and throw on an accessory or two. You are now ‘Swag Dracula’—a cape, fake teeth, skinnys, and a snapback. You tell yourself that no one remembers last week, much less last Halloween, when you were actually Dracula. Wrong.
The result: you’re shunned for lack of inventiveness by your circle of friends and Silverlake hipsters dressed as Richie Tenenbaum. You must now dance in a corner solo. You tell yourself it wasn’t your fault. It was the people throwing the party. They expected a costume. Deep down, you know it was you. You swag draculaed yourself. You are now officially a REJ3CT.
Yes, the REJ3CTZ, the group responsible for the inescapable (over 7,500,000 Youtube views and counting) hilarity of “Cat Daddy,” have returned with a new song and dance. Strike that. Reverse it. “Peta Griffin” isn’t a new song and dance. It’s a “Cat Daddy” cast off, the same cat in a slightly different costume. It’s old. It’s a rerun. We’ve seen it before.
I’m aware that “Peta Griffin” is a dance song and that I’m taking this shit way too seriously and groups like The REJ3CTZ are the rap equivalent of ’90s boy bands, but the similarities here are glaringly obvious and borderline ridiculous. Apart from the beat being cranked upa few BPMs, everything is the same, from the liberal use of vocal distortion to the drums to the failed carbon copy hook— “Call me SpongeBob/Stackin Krabby Patties/Bitch I go to work/Do my Cat Daddy/Cat Daddy, Cat Daddy, Cat Daddy, Cat Daddy (bitch I go to work) Vs. “I’m not a Family Guy/Got a lot of women/Creez to the max/Pockets Peta Griffin/Peta Griffin, Peta, Peta Griffin, Peta Griffin, Peta, Peta Griffin.”
Like most mass replicated products, the catchiness and the comedy of the original is lost in the rehash. The chuckle-worthy one liners like “You heard of Too $hort/Well, I’m too long” and “Block a hater like a goalie” have turned stale and, with the barrage of vocal effects, hardly discernible.
In looking past the cringe-worthy similarity and the shameless self-promotion of the REJ3CTZ “Creez” (I suspect it’s ‘creepy’ crossed with ‘steez’) clothing line, maybe I expected too much. Maybe you only get one hit from guys who spend most of their free time smoking ‘Wyclef kush’ and watching cartoons.
Really, I think I just never expected to see them again. The REJE3CTZ seemed so self-aware on “Cat Daddy,” like they were laughing just as much as we were. Like they were going to pull a Virgil Starkwell—take the money and run. Now it feels like I’m shaking my head at one of the “rappers” on Venice Beach trying to strong arm white people into buying their blank CD.
If Seth MacFarlane didn’t already have enough krabby patties to buy and sell twenty groups like the REJ3CTZ I’d tell the boys to lawyer the fuck up. I’ll be passing on the “Peta Griffin” and will continue, like I do every Halloween, to do the “Ditty” if I want to.
