If you want to give a physiotherapist a laugh, I recommend being forty and conspiring to develop a Flo Rida related injury. Your physio will love to hear about how you fuct an old knee injury by demonstrating how shorty got low on the dancefloor. It’s dumb. It’s retro. It’ll make them feel young again!

This is a long way of saying that I’m not currently walking so well. Biology was never a strong suit, so while I was aware that I’d damaged my hamstrings back in 2017, being told that I’d also torn my meniscus raised a few follow-up questions. Being at least as damaged on the mental plain as I am in the physical, my first thoughts were of Ghostface Killah’s ‘Superstar’: “Bankroll so thick I don’t need a wish list/Chain swing down to my torn meniscus.”

The album that hosts that song isn’t quite a classic. Originally intended as giveaway, Ghost swapped Apollo Kids in for the long promised but never delivered Supreme Clientele 2: The Blue and Cream Era in order to get out of his Def Jam deal:

Yeah, but that was a mixtape. That wasn’t no album. They wanted Supreme, I’m gassing for them to do Supreme. But I caught them real quick for their bread and then gave them Apollo Kids. That was gonna be called The Warm Up, but they was like, “Nah, I know what you’re trying to do.” They caught on.

So I just called it Apollo Kids. But I still kept Supreme on the side though and I’ve been holding it. I’ve been holding it, holding it, holding it and I still got it. 

Despite that disclaimer, Apollo Kids still has some of the casual magic of Ghost’s 2000s album run to it, and ‘Superstar’ is a good example of the record’s mediocre aspects as well as its strengths. Netherlands-based producer Shroom’s beat is as basic as his name might suggest, barely transforming its sample without tuning into the grain of Ghost’s voice like the similarly unreconstructed beats for ‘Big Girl‘ and ‘Holla‘ manage to. It doesn’t matter too much in the end though. The flute stabs and “He’s a superstar” backing vocals keep the energy high, and Busta and Ghostface dial into the blaxploitation theme like the just-past-their-prime veterans they were by this point.

It’s the “meniscus” bit that puts it over the line for me though. Trust the man who once finished a pornographic sex jam by talking about how diabetes messes with his ability to get his dick hard to smudge a standard rap boast into a line about having a gammy knee.

He makes it sound as slick as it looks too!

Given that my cats are looking at me like a lost cause, you’ll forgive me for clinging on to the sense that my lopsided motions have flair.