Mystikal - "Hit Me". This is a new song from Mystikal, who is listening to James Brown and turning his life around.

This is a video of the Apollo 16 lunar rover, from 1972. The footage has been "stabilized", adjusted from the original to reduce its shakiness. The reason it was shaky is that the cameraman was in space.

The thing about the lunar rover is that NASA paid to send a dune-buggy to space. They thought: OH shit! let's drive a car on the moon! Look at that thing move. Look at it bound. They are driving a car on the mfin' moon! Did the lunar rover have a tape deck? History does not apprise us. History is staying quiet. History is keeping the Polaroids to itself. Look at that lunar rover!

Look at that lunar rover move!

Chronology aside, it is not hard to imagine the Apollo 16 astronauts listening to Mystikal's "Hit Me". The man's an asshole but he did his time, maybe he's become a better dude. Maybe the president listened to "Hit Me" and signed off on the space mission's new soundtrack. "It's like James Brown but it's got more words," the president said. And the astronauts high-fived, secret-handshaked, smoothed the lunar rover's bumper stickers. GONE BASS FISHING, says one sticker, because the mission navigator is a bassist. SIRLOIN STEAK says another, because the module pilot is the son of a butcher.

Look at that lunar rover move!

Before the stabilized footage, the rover I imagined was always rickety, fragile, a spindly human machine on the surface of a foreign planet. Now it's a bounding hot rod, an celestially-pimped ride. Now it's the leaping astral embodiment of Mystikal's "Hit It" - skipping high-hat, shouts, rhymes, juicin' horns, burbling bass, lines that lift off and find air. "WOW!" The rover looks the way Mystikal sounds: supremely confident, fulfilled, embodied, an efficient machine that is finally executing the thing it was designed for. A fine piece of business.

[Mystikal on Soundcloud / with gratitude to Casimir]