The Libyan Foreign Minister is named “Musa Kusa.” At least I think he is the Foreign Minister or he may have defected at this point. Not sure but still the point is more about his name than his title. What I am wondering is if maybe he did not have a different name at some point and then he got renamed by QKGaddaffi. Maybe they were playing foosball in the palace basement one night and “Bob” or whatever his name was took a shot on goal while Mo let go of the handle to pick up his cigarette. That would be the kind of douchey thing that an equally douchey friend would use to saddle you with a nickname like “Musa Kusa.”
But where in the world, then, did GKQaddaffi get “Musa Kusa” from? Well, as we know, foosball really reached its zenith of popularity in North Africa somewhere around 1972, about the same time the rugby shirt was introduced to Tripoli. KQGaddaffi was already so annoyed with Bob for wearing horizontal stripes (which GKQaddaffi himself did not have the confidence to wear) that when Bob scored the DB goal, Mo ripped off the chorus of the recently popular Manu Diabango song “Soul Makossa” to give Bob a new name.
That chorus, of course, being “mama se mama sa ma makossa,” a derivation from a James Brown song which Diabango had heard. Having seen the vast potential for this chorus, KQGaddaffi then sought a way to use it in a plot to infiltrate the United States. By 1982, his shame regarding horizontal stripes had caused him to slim down to the point that Quincy Jones, seeking a stand in for his protege Michael Jackson (who had recently quit music to run the family convenience store in Gary, Indiana,) called in Mo to finish the “Thriller” album.
The only track needing substantial work was “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin'” and Mo’s main contribution was to again rip off the chorus of Diabango’s hit. As time progressed, however, it was clear to Jackson’s fans that something had changed. Witness the faux military outfits of the mid-eighties Jackson which were followed by such North African references as the Egyptian setting of the “Black or White” video. When the real Michael Jackson saw that wacked out Oprah interview GKQaddaffi pulled off a couple of years ago during a graveyard shift at the Quick Sack, he decided it was time to pull the plug.
So Mo went back to Libya and got busy getting the band back together. He sprung the Lockerbee dude out of Scotland and started calling Bob “Musa” again. Bob tried to get it expanded to “Mustafa” at least because that sounded a little bit sinister. No dice. Musa it was and Musa it would ever be. One consolation was that Mo had brought back some of the arcade games from Neverland so they did not have to play foosball any more. The rugby shirts were gone though because QKGaddaffi had sort of let himself go once the King of Pop gig ended. Now it’s hard to find shirts of any kind in the rubble.