My initial reaction was “WHAAA?”, however on reading the article this was revised to “Oh, yeah – that bit”. The problem is of course the third verse – not one of Mark Knopfler’s best moments – where the song repeatedly uses a rather nasty pejorative. Someone complained – quite justifiably in my opinion – and away we go.
There seems to be a lot of outrage floating around over the decision, but personally it doesn’t bother me that much. I’m as big a Dire Straits fan as the next guy (assuming the next guy is also tragically out of step with modern music) but the verse really is in rather poor taste. More importantly there’ve been versions of the song without the offending verse available ever since it was released – as long as these versions are still allowed on the radio, what does it matter? You don’t listen to Money for Nothing for the words, you listen for the durn-d-d-d-duuuurn! durn-durn-durn – durrrrrrn-durn! d-durn-durn-durn! d-d! (and for Mr Sting wailing about MTV).
The people who complain about this sort of thing are typically the ones who want to keep on using the offensive terms in question. They hide behind a facade of second-person artistic integrity, but fundamentally they want to keep the word ‘faggot’ in the song because they want to keep calling gay people – or simply anyone they don’t like – faggots. The idea that their apparently God given right to hate and belittle others is under threat is what upsets them – not that a song from 30 bloody years ago will now have to be played in slightly modified form.
Sheeze. You might as well complain about not being allowed to sing that verse from Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport.
Had a very enjoyable Boxing Day lunch at Rebecca and Dom’s yesterday. As is usual the postprandial conversation wandered all over the place, and happened to light upon a government funded bus that used to travel around from school to school testing children for signs of scoliosis. Our collective blood sugar levels being all over the place we found the concept of “the scoliosis bus” quite hilarious, and laughed like drains for a good five minutes.
Rebecca kindly gave me a lift home and on the short walk from her car to my apartment my brain insisted on whipping up a set of lyrics, which I now – shamefully – present to a candid world…
The Scoliosis Bus (to the tune of Jingle Bells)
A day or two ago, I thought I’d go to school,
And as I studied there, what vehicle up did pull?
The Nurse jumped out the bus, and measured up my spine,
She said “put on this truss and you will soon be feeling fine!”
Spinal cord! Spinal cord! Spinal chordate truss!
Oh what fun it is to ride in the Scoliosis Bus!
Spinal cord! Spinal cord! Spinal chordate truss!
Oh what fun it is to ride in the Scoliosis Bus!
Well it’s that time of year again, the voting has opened for the Triple J Hottest 100. Naturally I’ve jumped straight in and voted for my favourite 10 songs of the last year and shall present them here for the ridicule of all – but before I do I have to comment on the website they’ve thrown together to take the votes.
I ain’t impressed.
OK, I’ll qualify that. Overall the site is good, but it has a couple of critical bugs that made my voting a bit of a trial.
(For the record I’m using Firefox version 3.6.13)
Firstly, they appear to be using AJAX to add songs to the shortlist. This is fine – except they appear to be using the same XMLHttpRequest object each time you click a song, rather than spawning a new one.
What this means is that if you click to select a song, then click on another song before the result of the first click has been returned, the first click is effectively cancelled, and only the second song is added to the list. So you need to click, wait, click, wait, and so on, which kind of defeats the purpose of using AJAX in the first place.
The second bug is on the submission form you go to once your songs have been selected. I use an extension called CookieSafe to control the cookies on my machine. This allows me to block or modify cookies on a site-by-site basis. On the Triple J site I allow cookies, but have them all rewritten to be session only (ie: they evaporate when I close the browser).
Voting for the hottest 100 appears to require a long term cookie to be set – which is fair enough, I guess they’re using it to stop people voting multiple times. If this cookie is tampered with (or blocked) the form won’t submit. Also fair enough. But – what does the form tell you if this situation occurs?
It tells you that you haven’t filled out all of the fields.
Even when you have.
That’s bad. Really bad. An inappropriate error message is worse than no error message at all. I’m net savvy enough to figure out what’s going on and adjust my cookie settings appropriately, but plenty of other people aren’t, and could easily get so frustrated that they’d give up on voting altogether.
So, the ABC’s web department seriously needs to raise their game.
But, on to the fun stuff. The songs.
Whittling down my list to just 10 songs was a real challenge this year, especially once I realised that I was forgetting a bunch of really good tracks. But I laboured mightily and ended up with the following list, which I present in no particular order (apart from alphabetically by artist).
(Note: Helen and Ali, a bunch of these songs are on a mix-cd that shall shortly be winging your ways, so if you want to be surprised, stop reading – or at least clicking “play”- from this point on :))
The Bedroom Philosopher – Northcote (So Hungover)
The puntastic tale of a pretentious Emo riding around on the number 86 tram. I particularly like the concept of Sad Sanderson performing at the Fitzroy Anti-Social Club.
Cee Lo Green – Fuck You!
I don’t mind profanity in a song, as long as it serves a purpose. In this case the purpose is to form an integral part of a seamless, catchy, funky, brilliant motown track consummately performed by Mr Green. This is my confident tip for the number one spot. Those who find the lyrics offensive may prefer this bowdlerised version performed by the cast of Glee and (for some reason) Gwyneth Paltrow.
Chiddy Bang – The Opposite of Adults
A remix/reworking of MGMT’s Kids. And what a remix/reworking. Just as good as the original, although wildly different.
Grinderman – Palaces Of Montezuma
Ah, Nick Cave! Scary, growly Nick Cave who can make a song about JFK’s spinal cord sound like a visitation from the heavens. OK, it’s not exclusively about JFK’s spinal cord, but believe me, it’s in there, and it’s romantic as all get out.
Gypsy and the Cat – Jona Vark
Gypsy and the Cat were discovered by Triple J Unearthed, and you can just imagine them sitting around giggling saying “we’ll call our song Jona Vark, and everyone will think it’s Joan of Arc, and get all confused! Hurrah”. Normally this kind of tomfoolery would condemn one to a life of complete obscurity, but Gypsy and the Cat seemed to have made it work.
Kate Nash – Do Wah Doo
A few years ago I listed one of Kate Nash’s songs as the worst of the year. Possibly she heard about it, because she’s now come up with a 50’s inspired track that I’m totally in love with. It sounds like something put together by Phil Spector before he went mad and started killing people. Fantastic.
Marina and the Diamonds – Shampain
How to describe Shampain. Like falling into the pit of hell accompanied by a herd of rabid synthesizers? Perhaps, except that it’s awesome.
Philadelphia Grand Jury – Save Our Town
Some good, old fashioned Aussie rock/pop, without which no Hottest 100 list would be complete. Put your money down people!
Sia – Bring Night
Catchy and astronomically accurate! If you travel in the direction of your shadow the sun will go down a little sooner.
Yeasayer – Ambling Alp
A song about boxers from the 1930s. Or something. Certainly they get mentioned in there. I don’t really know, or really care, because it’s energetic, catchy, fun and puts the boot into fascists.
So that’s my ten. Here’s some others that only just missed out on making the cut…
Two great losses this week with the passing of author Ruth Park and musical-oddity extraordinaire Captain Beefheart.
Playing Beatie Bow was on the year nine syllabus when I was at school, so I read and studied the crap out of it. A lot of books suffer when you’re forced to do that to them, but Beatie Bow stood up. I haven’t read it for the better part of twenty years but I still recall vast swathes of it – it’s one of those books that gets into your head and changes it a bit so you’re never quite the same person after reading it.
More recently I obtained a copy of Ruth Park’s Sydney which provides a brilliantly written (if it wasn’t so pretentious I’d even say “sparkling”) history of the city via a series of walking tours. It’s clear that she had an incomparable love and knowledge of Sydney, and the book is going to be the first thing going into my case when I pack for my (Sydney departing) cruise in early 2012.
Captain Beefheart – well, what can you say about Captain Beefheart? A musical genius and provocateur without compare (unless it’s to his buddy Frank Zappa). I’ll let him speak for himself with the 1982 video clip of Ice Cream for Crow – a film so weird that a terrified MTV refused to play it, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York rushed to add it to their permenent collection.
Vale Ruth Park and Don Van Vliet. We’ll miss you both.
I know I’m just reposting from Boing-Boing (whaddya mean you don’t read Boing-Boing?) but this typographic treatment of Jonathan Coulton’s Shop Vac is near perfect.
Much to my disappointment this actually has nothing to do with the late, great John Stump and is in fact music from one of those inscrutable Japanese video games that no one over the age of 30 understands. This does not however prevent it from being awesome.
