Ice Cream Man

The ice cream truck. If you grew up in a certain kind of neighborhood, in a certain era, the sound of that music triggered a Pavlovian response: pure, desperate want.

Eddie Murphy understood this. In "Delirious," he builds an extended piece around the ice cream truck's arrival in his childhood neighborhood, and in doing so creates something that transcends nostalgia—a meditation on have and have-not rendered in the language of childhood.

Murphy doesn't just describe the scene—he becomes it. He's the truck itself, with its tinkling music promising salvation. He's the kids running from every direction, coins clutched in sweaty hands. He's the ice cream man, indifferent to the dramas playing out below his window.

But mostly, he's himself as a child: the kid whose mother said no. The kid standing there with nothing while the other kids made their purchases. The kid who had to watch.

And then comes the cruelty. The kids with ice cream don't just eat it—they perform it. They taunt. Murphy breaks into song, channeling the gleeful viciousness that only children possess:

"I got some ice cream, I got some ice cream, and you can't have none, 'cause you're on welfare. You didn't get none! Your mother is on relief! Your mother's on welfare!"

The song is horrible. It's also true. Kids are brutal, and Murphy captures that brutality while making you laugh at it. The bit works because everyone has been on one side of this equation or the other. You've wanted what you couldn't have. You've rubbed what you had in someone else's face. Childhood is preparation for capitalism.

Murphy performs all this at 22 years old, in a red leather suit, with the kind of energy that made people call him the next Pryor. Nobody else could do this—take something universal and make it feel specific, make it feel like his story even though it's everyone's story.