Last weekend my Dad convinced me to watch The Blues Brothers which was really great. Obviously there are some amazing performances in that movie but I was blown away by the “Minnie the Moocher” sequence in particular. Cab Calloway was born in 1907, he got his start doing vaudville, he was the first African-American to sell a million records, and here he is at 73, in a movie that is culturally intelligible to me in 2026. That’s absolutely crazy.

It’s also crazy to think that in 2026 The Blues Brothers is 46 years old, and when they released The Blues Brothers “Minnie the Moocher” was 49 years old, so it’s almost as long since The Blues Brothers as it was from the oldest music in it. I spent a lot of time trying to think about what a 2020s “Blues Brothers” would be like to try to get in the headspace of what The Blues Brothers were like for people watching SNL in the 70s. Maybe a modern version would just be about funk? With two white guys in their 20s doing Parliament covers? Vulfpeck could be the backing band? And then Chaka Khan could still be in it. But at the same time I feel like there just like is no comparison because of how much culture changed between 1931 and 1980. There hasn’t been a cultural revolution like we had in the 50s and 60s in that time, and tons of people still listen to music from 50 years ago because music is so readily available today. That, and I think it would be more broadly offputting today to have a couple of white guys lead a showcase of Black art.

Bonus track: “The Ghost of Smokey Joe”

So, bizarrely, I don’t think I had ever heard “Minnie the Moocher” before, but I have listened, many times, to it’s sequel: “The Ghost of Smokey Joe”.

This track is on a Halloween playlist I listen to every October and I guess it’s there because its about a ghost, otherwise it isn’t more Halloweeny-sounding than “Minnie the Moocher” already is. But it’s pretty much a carbon copy. The melody is similar, the scatting is the same, and it’s full of lyrical references, as if to be like “remember that other song you liked? It was good, huh?”. I’ve never seen this done before, I don’t know why you wouldn’t then just go listen to the better song? I guess it’s good to know that Minnie kicked her opium habit after Smokey overdosed…? Just in case we were all worried.