MANDINGO

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1973 exotica-tinged afro-funk, in a full-tilt David Axelrod library-music kind of way. Hairy voodoo beats. Sounds like the soundtrack if they made a black Indiana Jones. Which is kind of a black name already, come on. This album is seriously good, especially because I came across it just looking for things called "Mandingo." It's a fake exotica group invented by studio musicians, essentially Geoff Love & His Orchestra, who gained popularity primarily through big-band cover versions of TV & movie themes.

Courtesy of It's Coming Out Of Your Speaker



--Now I found this album while searching for things in this world which are called Mandingo. This because of T'Aja. T'Aja and her husband Bretly are very good friends of mine. Aja is studying to become a nurse, and will not hesitate to remind you of this in fairly graphic ways. Such as an email response to a social invitation saying "I can't go. I have to get up at 7 am to pull humans out of women's pussies. Think about it."
Recently she informed me that during her daylong engagement with said human-pulling, she was in the company of several older African-American nurses, one of whom when meeting a newborn male infant of particular endowment, exclaimed

"OOO lookatchoooo...Mandingo...."

And so a nickname for this infant was born, one that he will probably never learn of, although it is quite possible that all things considered it may not be his last.
From my research I gather that the most likely origin of this nickname comes from the eponymous male porn star, age 33, who has gained notoriety as having the most prominent member in the business and possibly the earth, to an extent that his name is now usable as a superlative adjective for any impressive link of man-sausage. (did I just write that?)

I could not find a Not-NSFW image of this gentlemen, the inspired reader is certainly welcome to take her (or his) own initiative on the matter.

I quote Wikipedia:
"Since 2002 Mandingo has focused mainly on interracial pornography. In 2007, Mandingo completed It Don't Matter, Just Don't Bite It, his 500th film in the adult entertainment industyr.

Several rappers have referenced Mandingo in their lyrics. Ludacris' song "Coming 2 America" includes the words "But I'm the light-skinned version of ManDingo...". Another reference to Mandingo was in the Wayans Bros produced film, White Chicks, where they ask a colleague if he thinks he's Mandingo."

Wikipedia however neglects to mention a reference in "Doin' It" by LL Cool J, where he expressly refers to being "Mandingo in the sack." This was heard in the grizzly van on the way back from Fort Tilden, somewhere on Bushwick Ave. The sheer summer steam from the concrete jungle had left us alone for the entire afternoon on the beach and by the time LL was comparing himself to a pornography actor the heat had enveloped us again, like a localized urban version of the Nothing from "The Neverending Story."

There is also a 1975 film which bears the name. According to Wikipedia, the porn actor was also born in 1975 and that the sharing of the name Mandingo is a complete coincidence, both independently deriving, it seems, from the West African ethnic group Mandinka or Mandingo, which has a population of some 6.5 million.

Here's a trailer for the film, which I'm sorry considering our previous considerations of the title is pretty funny. The movie is about racial violence in the south, and has been called by Quentin Tarantino "a big-budget exploitation movie on par with Showgirls." It has for good reason been pilloried because of its absurd racial content. The careful reader will of course noted that both the adult movie actor Mandingo and the 1975 film place emphasis on interracial erotic relationships aka Jungle Fever, aka Mandingo & The Queen Mary.




Contained within this genealogy of Mandingo I'm sure there's a number of penetrating insights to be made about race, exploitation, erotics, interracial doin' it, and so on, but I'm too lazy to think of what those are. I will allow the information heretofore compiled to suffice as inspiration for those who will follow me.