Are you mad at your ears and want to punish them with something horrible? I've got just the thing.
It's a rap song, written and performed by a former hedge-fund trader, singing the praises of the defunct hedge fund Galleon Group, whose founder is now in prison for insider trading. If that doesn't sound quite terrible enough, it's set to the tune of the Shirley Temple ditty "The Good Ship Lollipop."
Hip hop and you don't stop! Actually, no. DO stop.
The person responsible for this tune is Turney Duff, a former Galleon trader and more recently author of a Wall Street memoir called "The Buy Side." He recorded it under the name Cleveland D, because his flow is like a river of burning pollution, possibly.
Duff was aided and abetted in this by the "frat-rap" artist Jesse Itzler, a/k/a Jesse Jaymes, whose work includes such classics as "Shake It Like A White Girl" and "College Girls Are Easy."
The song first surfaced in 2009, when Galleon's insider-trading troubles were just beginning. Duff posted it to his blog this week in honor of the recent death of Shirley Temple Black. "I thought it was appropriate," he wrote, adding: "RIP..."
The song was recorded in happier times, when Galleon had not yet been completely crushed under the weight of a massive insider-trading scandal.
"We trade stocks, and we're doing well," one trader brags in the song. Too well, it turned out: Founder Raj Rajaratnam, whose "stocks don't miss," according to Cleveland D, is doing 11 years in the federal pen for his stocks not missing. The government's investigation of Galleon's insider-trading web has rounded up dozens of people, including other former Galleon employees (not including Duff).
"Not my proudest moment," Duff concedes of the song, "but whatever – I’d do it again."