Who is Ollie Nightingale and Why Has He Ruined my Day?

This is a thing that exists! It's a blues/R & B album. Ollie Nightingale wants to drink your bathwater, baby. Is this comedy? Is it satire? Is Ollie some sort of Weird Al style parodist? I have no idea. Decades of Gen-X irony has destroyed by brain to such a degree that I am incapable of discerning between thick layers of cynical irony and detachment and a genuine sentiment expressed in music.

I found this image on a Facebook page, yes I am ashamed of having joined a Facebook group prior to turning 50 but here we are. So taken with this image was I that my entire life came to a stop. My work projects, my assignment to examine the movies of The Exorcist franchise, and all deadlines of any kind melted away from my mind as my consciousness became enveloped by this image, this title and the very existence of this man, Ollie Nightingale.

I didn't merely want to know more about this. I wasn't merely harboring a curiosity regarding this image, this song, this album, and this man, I needed to know what this was and where it had been for the entirety of my existence. How is it possible that something this flagrantly in poor taste had evaded my Spidey sense for cringe-tastic popular culture. I fancy myself as a sort of pop culture archaeologist whose life revolves around knowing and mentally cataloguing the strangest and most and egregious corners of popular culture.

Why I once watched the pilot for the television show WALTER, a spinoff about the MASH character Walter 'Radar' O'Reilly. Who else can claim that they have done this? Not many, I assure you dear reader. Many may have tried but few made it through an entire episode of the show because it is inept to such a remarkable degree that popular culture has worked very hard to hide away its existence. Only a true diver of the depths of detritus knows of the existence of WALTER.

So, again, how? How had I, a connaiseur of the most finite trash in the history of American popular culture managed to miss this? A 'love song,' an earnest bluesy ballad of unrequited love in which a man genuinely compares drinking bathwater to drinking delicious lemonade, how did I not know that this existed until today? Where has my life gone wrong? How can I look my fellow fans of deleterious pop detritus in the eyes? I am truly shamed.

Now, perhaps, I could be forgiven if this was something that came to exist before I was born. This blindspot in my pop culture knowledge could be understood if this record and song had existed in, say, 1974, years before my birth. But no, no dear reader. My shame is real, for you see, this album, this loving tribute to fetishizing a woman to a disturbing degree, was released in 1995. I was in college. I hosted a college radio show. I hosted a college radio show that played cringe music as comedy!

My shame is unending. I am cloaked in failure. I am forever haunted by a life that carried on without ever knowing that Ollie Nightingale's ode to drinking a woman's bathwater ever existed until now. What other blindspots might I have? Are there perhaps not one but two songs which refer to a woman's vagina as a Booga Bear? Yes, actually there are. And I now know this because Ollie Nightingale performs one of them! The other is more famous which makes my oversight so much worse. Singer Bobby Rush, who I am familiar with, popularized the term 'Booga Bear' in 1995. DAMMIT!

If you don't believe this exists, here's Ollie's take on the Booga Bear phenomenon, "You Got a Booga Bear Under There." Is he making a statement? Is that a question he's asking? I don't know, but now I have to know and the rest of my day is ruined!