Ebonics Professor and drummer in ski goggles


Background:

I saw a clip of Shania Twain in concert on CMT the other night and the brief clips of the drummer clearly showed he was wearing ski goggles. He looked a little . . . out of place. Did he just come down off the slopes? Are they to protect his eyes from any pyrotechnics/light show? [If Rikki Rockett, Tommy Lee or Peter Criss don’t need them, that couldn’t possibly be the reason]. Does he think they, ahem, make him look cool? Boy, is he wrong! Hey, that sounds like the title of a Shania Twain song!!

Objective:

Find out why Shania Twain’s drummer wears ski goggles while drumming.

Course of Action:

Google, baby. I put my fly researching skills to work and typed in “Shania Twain Drummer” as my initial search. Homeboy’s name is J.D. Blair. And he’s quite fluent in ebonics. I quickly found he has his own website: www.jdblair.net. Darlings, I opened pandora’s box when I investigated further.

Results:

He does claim the googles are for eye protection from pyrotechnics. I got this from his online diary: “Matta of fact, most of the e's were NkwireNabout the goggles! :0) Dragon Optical makes them, & they keep the pyro out of my peeperz when stuff blowz up!” [1/27/03]

I still call BS on that.

With the mystery of the goggles solved I decided to hang around the diary, thanks to his obscure, ebonics-filled writing style.

Clearly he seeks out alternative ways to spell every word. Because that’s kewl, I guess. I never would have assumed pretending to be woefully uneducated would be celebrated. Maybe I’m ignorant.

And yet, in spite of all of this, I’m strangely intrigued. Yes, I need to pull out my decoder ring to understand what he’s writing, but there’s a little part of me that wonders what he’s going to write next and, more importantly, how! How would he spell “December,” for example? “DEEsehmburh,” perhaps.

I’d like to cut and paste his entire diary, but that doesn’t make sense. So I’ll leave you with this choice nugget taken from his most recent entry (May 30) of this year:

“Here tiz, 2006. Wut da wurl'? My how flies time. I'm gunna B dropN sum Nfo on U Catz N about 7 daze. U wanna know now don't cha? Ain't gunna tellityet.”

Wow.

g.