When Ron Artest ran into the stands and started throwing punches a few months ago, most people thought about the brawl, I wondered how this would impact his female R & B record by the group Allure. Particularly after his shameless promotion of the CD on the Today Show. Given that Allen Iverson (after dragging his wife naked into the street) and Kobe Bryant (after being charged with rape) saw their jersey sales rise, one would think Allure might be the real beneficiary of Artest's charge into the crowd. This has not, however, been the case as Allure sold just 800 albums through the end of November. Aside from wondering how many of these purchases might be attributed to Ron Artest himself, I found this shocking because Allure's first single was so ripe with profundity that it needed a parenthetical to explain the significance of the song's title. Of course the name of the song was "Uh Oh" which is so enigmatic of a title that it left me thinking to myself, what's gone wrong? But I was relieved to see that when I continued reading, the parenthetical eased my concerns "(Leaving with Me)." Thankfully this put the entire song into context for me. We then know that the "Uh Oh" in the title is not, in fact, the same uh oh that young children utter when they drop their juice boxes, but is, rather, the more taunting uh oh as in I'm so dangerous/threatening/smooth/fly/bad. You can imagine my relief when I discovered that Allure was not actually in any danger themselves and had not dropped their juice boxes.

Now as past column readers will note, I am indisputably pro-parenthetical. So pro-parenthetical that the 27 has remarked "I'm not sure about this parenthetical thing of yours." But, and this is key, so far as I know there have not been parentheticals in any titles of my columns. Now that I have eliminated any parenthetical hypocrisy on my own part I can ask with total sincerity, when in the world did song titles become so complicated that they needed to be explained in parentheticals?

Diligent internet reasearch of "song parentheticals" on google produced no list of songs with parentheticals as I had hoped. In fact the top search result was this: http://www.tpwmi.com/parentheticals.html. This site was incredibly frightening as for some reason it quotes Revelation in red and green lettering. For those of you who are wrinkling your foreheads in uncertainty, you are definitely going to hell, that's Revelation from the Bible. For those of you who recognized that Revelation is from the Bible there is only a possibility that you will be going to hell. So if someone wrote a song about this scary site that was the top find on my internet research it would be entitled either,

1. Uh oh (You're going to hell) or
2. Uh oh (I'm not going to hell)

The first would be the childish juicebox falling use of the phrase uh oh, the second would be the uh oh in the dangerous/threatening/smooth/fly/bad context.

Since my own internet search ended so futilely, we are announcing a new feature on our site. Parenthetical song of the week/month/until we manage to change the song or you send in new ones. Provide your own analysis as to the significance of the parenthetical if you wish (or we will attempt to divine it ourselves).