His Royal Hipness, Lord Buckley, was an eccentric cat who made his mark in the 1940s and 1950s by recasting familiar tales in ultra-cool language. Jesus became “The Nazz,” Gandhi “The Hip Gan,” - even Nero and Marc Antony got all hip-hopped when he talked about them.
Buckley took on the subject of Roman antiquity several times, turning the well-known stories of Nero and of Caesar’s funeral into his own modern masterpieces. In his remake of Marc Antony’s funeral oration for Caesar (as written by Shakespeare) the funked-out phrase “Hipsters, flipsters and finger-poppin’ daddies: knock me your lobes“replaces the Bard’s “Friends, Romans, Countrymen lend me your ears.” Buckley’s commentary on Nero - the fun-loving, bad-boy emperor of the first century BC - is just as brilliant. Here’s an excerpt:
Man, you don’t know who Nero is. Let me Hip You! Nero was one of the wildest, gonest, freakiest studs who ever stomped through the pages of history. He’s the kind of a cat that balled every big swingin’ main day breeze, all the time every day. And the chicks were jumpin’ and the juice was flyin’ and the band was blowin’ and Nero havin’ himself a fine time, continual! This cat balled Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. In fact he balled so crazy and so far out that occasionally he get his kick warehouse so full of kicks he can’t tick no more kicks in, and when there ain’t no place to put ‘em the po’ cat get hung. But he ain’t hung for long, cause he whip out his scratch pad, which the cat always carried with him and he write on the “O-bob-a-do, O-bop-a-day, you wid me, and I’m wid you,” and he showed it to the Head Pretorian Stud, and the Head Pretorian Stud take one look and his eyes light up and he say: “Man, dig what this genius done put down! This cat is pushin’ Shakespeare!
Buckley recast the past in his own terms - and he made it fun! Today he’s often called the first rapper for his frantic spray of black street ling, jazz-speak, and hipster jive. But in his own day, the Lord of Hipdom was a bit too weird to be more than a cult. Nonetheless his comic sense of cool influenced many performers, including Lenny Bruce and Bob Dylan.
Click here to read the Lord’s brilliant adaptation of Marc Antony’s famous speech and here to read more of his hipped out version of Nero’s life.
