We were uncertain whether to blog about Michael Jackson’s death since we’re in the business of flambéing tabloid-fodder celebs whenever we have the opportunity (though we must stress how much we also relish poking a stick in the common man’s ribs).
Michael Jackson was the king of the tabloids (who until yesterday were referring to him as “The Self-Proclaimed King of Pop” – get ready for more shameless post-mortem backstepping than after Diana’s death), the wellspring of more checkout-aisle drivel than anyone who has ever lived – yes, we stand by what would be hyperbole about anyone else – and the punchline to more late-night monologue jokes than OJ Simpson and any two American presidents you got combined. Hell as recently as Monday, we were pulling out of the gift-that-keeps-giving Jacko joke bag.
But we’re also children’ of the 1980s, a decade that thankfully preceded the YouTube generation. Had somebody’s mobile phone camera been trained on us back in those days you might have seen one or both of us in those leather jackets with zippers, pitting a Michael Jackson doll in an uneven fight with a Mr. T action figure, or wearing one glove (doing so and coming through Canadian winters with all fingers accounted for was just good luck). Neither of us would ever own up to behind-closed-doors moonwalking, but let’s just say that Michael Jackson was as much a part of 80s childhoods as He-Man, bad cinema, and insatiable yuppie greed that shat on the hopes and ideals of the two decades that preceded it.
Chris remembers hearing Thriller for the first time at his cousin’s house and it blowing his mind. Noel remembers a running feud with an older neighbor kid who ridiculed him for saying (in the chirpish voice of youth) that Thriller and Bad were awesome. The neighbor insisted that Michael Jackson was just a poor man’s Lionel Richie and was not afraid of doling out a noogie to get his point across. (If that guy’s reading today, let’s just say that, Thriller, the best-selling album of all time – which in effect is an untouchable record because computer piracy has killed the album – well, it wasn’t put out by Lionel.) What we both remember are sounds that will forever be there in our minds. We think back to our childhoods and remember this music and – unlike the majority of 80s television and the second Terminator film – it stands the test of time, and we give ourselves credit for not having tin ears at that age.
Of course, then there were the 1990s. Michael Jackson’s musical output deteriorated and things got from cute weird – who wouldn’t want a pet chimpanzee (though maybe not to hang around with an aged Liz Taylor) – to the kind of weird that made liking him as a musician an awkward thing to admit.
It seems that if you’re a celebrity from a humble start, that included in the welcome gift bag you get upon entry into the club of the super fabulous is a posse of bloodsuckers incapable of giving advice other than “I think it’s time you sign the monthly pay slips, boss.” Throw in a mind that is not exactly a specimen of sound health and the results are inevitable – Howard Hughes insane and pissing in specimen bottles while his fortune crumbles, Mike Tyson boxing tomato cans for the minimal cash that’s in it, Michael Jackson building the Neverland Ranch, and inviting children into a world that screamed, “We find on behalf of the plaintiff”.
The charges against him lose some steam when you look at those making them. What manner of person sends their kids for pajama parties at the home of a pop star who is, at best, a troubled middle-aged man who thinks cotton candy should be available on demand?
We’re not the types to look back on Annie Hall or Hannah and Her Sisters with a perspective skewed by the Soon-Yi affair – they remain classics… though we will drop Woody like a turd from a tall horse if he does another film with Scarlett Johansson. (Some things are just unforgivable). A creative work of merit stands above and apart from the personal shortcomings of its creator. Thank the pharaohs for that or we’d be in trouble.
For those of us who grew up with his sounds causing us early ear drum damage, his music gets the first two or three tracks of our life soundtracks.
Michael Jackson produced more great music between the ages of six and eight than any of the Idol programs will produce in their entire run. R.I.P.
Just when you thought it was safe to venture into the barn again, after Bessie’s ozone layer destroying farts and Mad Cow disease, along comes the swine flu – the latest assault on humanity perpetrated by a creature most commonly seen on breakfast plates.
Given the amount of ink devoted to SARS, the bird flu, killer bees, etc, we can only guess that swine flu – so named because it is a mutation of a kind of flu found in pigs, not because the people who get it are assholes, cops or both – will be a boon for people who sell masks and bad news for Jimmy’s Oinker Palace Drive Thru BBQ and Carwash (and in our faces constantly until the mass media find another story to help stop their hemorrhaging, at least temporarily).
We’re of the opinion that something shouldn’t be called an epidemic until it fells at least one person on everybody’s Facebook page, but of course the media is doing the world a service by preaching caution. For example, if you work in a place where they kill 1 million pigs a year, don’t spend your break time taking deep breaths next to a giant pile of fly-infested shit.
Despite what lethargic vegetarians will tell you, pork makes everything better and we’re not going to forgo barbecues or snub any Chinese restaurants with menus in their windows bearing cartoon likenesses of our porcine friends, just in case there is some infinitesimal chance that we get our names on a newspaper’s front page in a nationwide swine flu death tally.
We reckon every pandemic needs a soundtrack (featuring tunes other than Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu), and there have been many – we put the number at 10 – written about pigs. Here then as we cough into our sleeves and get ready to order a couple of ham on ryes, are our Top 10 Swine Flu Songs!
10. Pigs in Zen:Jane’s Addiction. Perry Farrell said: “If you want to talk about reaching nirvana, reaching Zen, well, the pig is closer than we are because the pig doesn’t have material possessions.” While this can be said about any of the other 20 million species in existence (unless you exempt Rex and his chew toy, and primates from their implements of death), this is still a fine porcine ditty. If you can’t quite make out the lyrical nuances in the following video, he’s basically saying stuff like “Pig’s in the mud/When he tires/Pig’s in zen” and “Pig eats shit/But only when he hungers/Pig’s in zen.” Later on the pig gets butchered, the price he pays for this idyllic restful life he has always living in the moment. The human equivalent is an eviction notice from your mother’s basement.
9. Generation Swine: Mötley Crϋe. Mötley Crϋe did more for German Umlaut-related rock bands than anyone previously. Their song, Generation Swine and album of the same name don’t appear to have anything to do with our curly-tailed comrades, but we do find it ironic that such a staple of the 1980s would release something bearing nearly the same name as Hunter S. Thompson’s “Generation of Swine,” a send-up of the 1980s, and, more than likely, of them.
8. Pig: Weezer. “When I was a baby I was so happy, I played with my friends in the mud”. We were about to call Social Services on the singer’s mother, before we looked at the title of this one and realized he’s narrating the story from the perspective of a pig — and not the guys you see slumped along perverts’ row at strip clubs.
This song is the musical equivalent of Charlotte’s Web and has likely provided the soundtrack to many a mock-ham holiday roast. It tells the story of a young pig growing up happily, remembering how he used to frolic around in the barn and going to that fateful day with the cleaver. Nearly enough to make you consider holding the bacon on the next BLT, if there weren’t so much value in that extra value menu.
7. Swine: Elvis Costello. Elvis Costello has proven himself a capable interviewer on that new show of his, where he speaks to musicians like The Police and isn’t fazed by two thirds of the band’s conspicuous loathing of Sting—you’d be hard-pressed to find a group more embarrassed/appalled by their front man whose band name doesn’t start with a ‘U’ and have two letters in it.
As we’ve seen here, pigs have inspired their fair share of songs, at least ones we were able to uncover with minimal effort though Google, rather than low-balling garage sale vinyl vendors. This trend is likely to continue unless militant vegetarians— who despite their militancy can be still be blown over by a gust of wind strong enough to keep a flag fluttering—manage to exert enough influence that Green Eggs and Ham becomes Green Eggs and Tofurkey to future generations.
Elvis C. was more direct in this little ditty apparently penned about someone he loathed: “You’re a swine and I’m saying that’s an insult to the pig. In the foul furrow that you dig”. Let’s hope that if things go south with Diana Krall, she isn’t the same kind of reverse muse.
6. War Pigs: Black Sabbath. Ozzy didn’t have the rhyming dictionary handy when he penned “generals gathered in their masses, just like witches at black masses”.
Actually ‘War pigs’ themselves, nearly made it onto our list of Top 10 Exploding Animals because in ancient Rome, porkers were covered with flammable materials, set on fire, and driven towards enemy elephants to fend off the likes of Hannibal. Just like the other thing that gave Ned Beatty nightmares in Deliverance, the pigs’ squeals would apparently drive away the giant beasts. We don’t know how this idea was devised, but the Eternal City did boast a 7000 + volunteer fire department, and odds are pretty good that at least one of them was a pyromaniac—though lighting a pig on fire without an apple in its mouth and your neighbors over for beers seems a tad barbaric.
5. Pigs on the Wing / Pigs: Pink Floyd. The strangest declaration of love for one’s spouse ever recorded, we would’ve liked to have been a fly on the wall for that explanatory conversation with Mrs Roger Waters, along with anything “honey, does this make me look fat?”-related.
It would take going to the library and wading through a Pink Floyd unauthorized biography to find out why pigs feature so prominently in their music, as well as in Pink Floyd stage productions. Unless you count the first ten rows at a Bon Jovi concert, no other artist can make such a claim as to their influence.
4. Pearls before Swine: Bob Dylan. The phrase is of course, part of the Sermon on the Mount, which sounds like how you’d be lectured by ski patrol if you ventured off a black diamond run.
In all seriousness though, it’s that compilation of Jesus’ sayings [Matthew 7:6], that included ’salt of the earth’, ‘turning the other cheek’, ‘you can’t teach an old dog new tricks’ and those other pithy bits, which if he made those statements today, would comprise a greatest hits album and accompanying DVD.
‘Pearls before swine’ refers to ‘Items of quality offered to those who aren’t sophisticated enough to appreciate them,’ kinda like complimentary opera tickets with your admission to a tug-o-war contest (this analogy might be a little thin, but we don’t claim to be theologians, unless the collection plate happens by).
3. March of the Pigs: Nine Inch Nails. Certainly not a toe-tapper to waltz to at the next luau-themed wedding, this song features the lyrics: “The pigs have won tonight”.
That might be true, but humankind will eventually prevail with a vaccine if not in reality, than in the Michael Bay version of events brought to the big screen. If researchers should fail and the thing spreads, well, you might find this website updated with considerably less frequency than it is now—i.e., not at all.
2. Spider Pig Song: The Simpsons. Some things in life are a mystery, like when in every mediocre action movie somebody with a blazer and a crew cut says “Gentlemen, failure is not an option”. Another mystery is how Homer Simpson’s ‘Spider Pig’ song amassed more than 5 and a half million Youtube views. While it’s a catchy ditty (”Spider pig, spider pig, spider pig, does whatever a spider pig does, can he swing from a web? no he can’t, ’cause he’s a pig”) we weren’t sure about its inclusion here. However, considering that if you add up all of Elvis Costello’s Youtube views (we don’t recommend this as a way to spend a rainy afternoon) you probably wouldn’t even come close to this song…anyhow…on to our numero uno.
1. Piggies: The Beatles. Charlie Manson, the serial killer and popularizer of the Swastika tattoo between the eyes (a look that hasn’t really caught on in that it’s pretty career-limiting— unless you have a job that requires wearing a hat) was apparently so influenced by this song that the phrase “death to pigs”, was scrawled in blood on the walls of the Tate mansion.
If things had turned out differently, say, if Neil Young or the Beach Boys had secured him a record deal, he might’ve followed a different path other than mass murderer or maybe written “death to walruses or Paul McCartney” instead. Here’s Manson warbling ‘Look at Your Game Girl‘. We’re pretty sure after enduring this, that Charlie made the right career choice. Part of an animal triad of songs (Blackbird and Rocky Raccoon being the others) on the Beatles album, it was first considered an anti police song among the many, less killing-fueled interpretations.
Most songwriters will at some point pen an ode to the place that gave them the early inspiration to pursue a career in music — i.e. the taunts of jocks or the realization that guys who can play guitar stand a better chance of getting laid than even the most advanced Dungeons and Dragons master.
As Spinal Tap made clear, few things can rouse a crowd out of a beer stupor more effectively than shouting out “Hello ___ [insert name of podunk town here]” and if you can actually work a place name into your song, then you have a sentimental favorite that will last as long as there are DJs picking songs who have not gone beyond a 50-kilometre radius of their birth homes in their entire lives.
Something appeals about state songs — Shark Guy Noel is still looking for the right chanteuse to get behind his St. Catharines, Ontario-inspired toe-tapper, “Pardon My Garden City”. There is mileage to be had out of the state song whether it is coopted as part of a state tourism campaign or used in an ironic, mocking way by some smart-ased filmmaker exorcising the demons of his teenage years. In Part One of Our US State Song list, we brought you from Alaska to Mississippi, hope you weren’t stung by anything too horrific on that trip, and today it’s the more boring sounding trip of Missouri to Wyoming.Here is Part Two of Our Rundown of Songs for Every State!
Missouri: Missouri Moon, Rhonda Vincent. Across the Wide Missouri, Weavers. Rejected license plate slogan: Missouri Loves Company. One of the best movies ever set in Missouri, (though admittedly, this is a list about as long as your arm if you fell asleep during workplace safety classes at the saw mill) is Roadhouse. This movie we feel, gives us a fairly accurate representation of what it must be like to live in the state when you cannot pay your bar tab.
Montana: Montana Skies, John Denver. Montana, Frank Zappa. Stephen Colbert would not like Montana, home to the largest grizzly bear population in the lower 48 states (In Alaska, they drive cars and can vote in municipal elections). Montana did not fare too well in the state song sweepstakes with these two. We guess all that wide open space can drive a man to think some crazy things, as evidenced in Zappa’s “Montana”, which he calls the perfect place to… uh… grow a crop of dental floss. The song does however have the distinction of offering the strangest ever reference to wrangling in a song: “With a pair of zircon-encrusted tweezers in my hand/every other wrangler would say I was mighty grand.”
Nebraska: Nebraska, Bruce Sprinsteen. Nick Nolte, Marlon Brando, Fred Astaire and Montgomery Clift were born in Omaha, which is also the subject of an awful Counting Crows song. These random births in a little-heard-of state have whatever significance you may attach to them — in our case that is no significance whatsoever. But they were born there, unless someone edits Wikipedia within the hour you’re reading this and proves us wrong.
New Jersey: Jersey Girl, Tom Waits. New Jersey is my Home, Bruce Springsteen. New Jersey is consistently referred to as the Armpit of America, and who are we to judge having only been to Jersey City, Newark…er…as far as ‘judgability’ goes, we could probably be given a gavel and robe. On the plus side (the New York side), we hear Hoboken is nice and nowhere near the place Frank Sinatra refused to acknowledge as his home town. Here’s a list of 5 Reasons Not to Move to New Jersey.
Nevada: Sands of Nevada, Mark Knopfler. Stop in Nevada, Billy Joel. The name Nevada means ’snow covered’ in Spanish and ‘brothel’ in Esperanto. Both of these are right on the money in their own way. Knopfler’s gambler’s lament tells of a pain felt by many visitors of Nevada, the unofficial state motto of which is, “Supporting children — the government can always help you out.”
New Hampshire: New Hampshire, Sonic Youth. Ten points to the first person who can explain to us what the hell Sonic Youth is going on about in this song. New Hampshire is a lovely place — one of us visited stately Mt. Washington and has the “This car climbed Mt. Washington” bumper sticker (mint condition) to prove it — but few things rhyme with Hampshire and this state hasn’t exactly inspired a musical treasure trove.
New Mexico: New Mexico, Johnny Cash. Taos, New Mexico, Waylon Jennings. Cash’s song is unlikely to feature at state sporting events or beauty pageants. Here’s the ending: To all you happy people/This much I have to say/Go back to your friends and loved ones/Tell others not to go/To the god forsaken country/They call New Mexico
New York: New York New York, Frank Sinatra. New York State Police, UK Subs. Old Jersey Frankie might have been singing about NYC, but an exception will suffice — after all, it’s the city so nice they named it twice. As Ontario residents, we have yet to hear a good song about cross-border pillaging when currency fluctuations allow… we may just pen such a ditty ourselves.
North Dakota: North Dakota, Lyle Lovett. Another state that wants to think it’s Germany before the Berlin Wall came down. When Julia Roberts married Lyle Lovett, it was a weirder romantic match than Celine Dion and that creepy svengali she hooked up with at an age that would have even Woody Allen say, ‘Meh, she should have a few miles on her first’. Still, Lyle is a great talent, and while the same cannot be said for his ex-wife, we wish her all the best and hope she makes a movie one day that doesn’t remind us in graphic and immediate fashion of what we had for breakfast.
Ohio: Ohio, CSNY. Look at Miss Ohio, Gillian Welch. As young fellas, we joined a couple of buddies and made a lemon out of a rental car by putting 3,800 kilometres on it on a road trip from Toronto to New Orleans. We stopped in Ohio, where the snow made it look like Canada, and caught the wonder of Mansfield’s Denny’s in a blizzard. We also saw John Lennon’s broken death glasses at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and one of Bono’s creepy, small-sized stage costumes, and later we remarked that Cincy looked nice from the bridge. Such is our knowledge of Ohio. And for those who want to follow Gillian’s advice and look at Miss Ohio, well she’s on the left.
Oklahoma: Oklahoma. Oklahoma Borderline, Vince Gill. Okie from Muskogee inspired Asshole from El Paso. And anybody who has ever watched a Broadway musical and thought “That could have used more chaps,” will enjoy this one. The Shark Guys wrote a song for a revival of this musical called “Idle Thoughts of a Singing Shit-Kicker”, but, sadly, it was rejected.
Oregon: Portland, Oregon, Jack White Loretta Lynn. Jack White’s band, The White Stripes always wear, black, red and white, “the most powerful color combination of all time, from a Coca-Cola can to a Nazi banner” and for some reason this makes sense coming from Mr White, a former upholsterer. This song doesn’t have a whole lot to do with Oregon as you can get shamelessly drunk and sleep with a stranger in any state of the union — though watch what laws you’re violating in Utah — such is the beauty of cheap booze. “Next day we knew last night got drunk/But we loved enough for the both of us/In the morning when the night had sobered up/It was much too late for the both of us in Oregon.” That might be the best defence of drunk sex we’ve ever read “loved enough for the both of us”. Must be all those great microbrews they have in Oregon.
Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania 6-5000, Brian Setzer, Pennsylvania, Bloodhound Gang. Pennsylvania is home to three much-maligned cities, Scranton (because of the good, but not as good as the UK version of The Office), Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, but Steeltown is Shitsburgh no more and Philly is the kind of place where it’s fun to get silly. We’re in a rhyming mood today, what of it? Here we offer you two songs from different hemispheres of the musical globe. First person to inform us what a wawa is gets 10 points.
Rhode Island: Road to Rhode Island, as heard on Family Guy. Family Guy undoubtedly is a comedic fart in the wind compared to the Simpsons’… chronic gastro-intestinal condition of animated situation comedy? Not as well written or heartfelt as the Simpsons in its heyday, but pretty good nonetheless at least in the “throw as many jokes at the viewer even if the majority don’t stick”, school of comedy, here is a musical number on the Griffin family’s home state.
South Carolina: Cocaine Carolina, Johnny Cash and David Allan Coe. South Carolina, Archers of Loaf. We won’t get into the whole why North/South state divisions will be banned in the new order, but South Carolina did get recognized in these two songs. Cocaine Carolina features the amazing lyric: “Feeling like my belly was a warehouse for the blues.” For those of you interested in reading our list of our fave Cocaine Songs, click here
South Dakota: South Dakota, Liz Phair. South Dakota Morning, Bee Gees: One of these songs is filled with the angst of telling off big city folk without mincing words, and the other one is something that a poncey git wrote down when he saw an eagle fly above him while out on the patio in some godforsaken South Dakota backwater. Lyrics from the first: “Born in South Dakota /Hey, we’re going to a rodeo town/I’m gonna get drunk and fuck some cows/Hey all you city fucks, it’s a praireman’s world.” Lyrics from the second song: “The eagle flies on a South Dakota morning/And I don’t see my eagle anymore/Now stranger, I must kill you/You must survive, but will you.” The Bee Gees are only slight less threatening than bakery icing, so we’ll go with Liz Phair for giving the better tribute to the state that is still home to Deadwood, wellspring of the best damn television series in the history of the medium. Deadwood that is.
Tennessee: Tennessee Stud, Jimmie Driftwood as performed by Doc Watson. Lebanon, Tennessee, Ron Sexsmith. The Mercy Lounge in Cannery Row, Nashville, is one of the greatest live music venues you’ll ever come across, and this is in a city that boasts the Grand Old Opry and the Ryman Auditorium. Lucky bastards. Tennessee Stud is a travelling tale, telling of horses won on bets and a lonesome cowboy travelling back to Tennessee to find his true love (and he also matches up his horse with his woman’s, which is damned convenient. He describes his hurdles getting back: We loped on back across Arkansas/
I whipped her brother and I whipped her pa/I found that girl with the golden hair/And she was ridin’ on a Tennessee mare.
Texas: T for Texas, Jimmie Rodgers. Texas Flood, SRV. Luckenbach Texas, Waylon Jennings. On that southern road trip many moons ago, we pulled into Meridian, Mississippi to find a greasy spoon and fortuitously happened upon the birthplace of the brilliant Jimmie Rodgers, who noted in this tune, that T is for Texas. We defaced something in the park there and moved on.
Vermont: Moonlight in Vermont, Billie Holiday. Vermont, Cursive. Vermont is often stereotyped as a bastion of sandal-wearing, roller blading, wool sweater-clad, Vegan, detoxing, ‘Eat more kale’ bumpersticker sporting, scented candle & patchouli paintywaists. Well that’s no so bad. British Columbia is like that, but there’s more chance of tumbling down a bigger mountain there.
We were uncertain whether to blog about Michael Jackson’s death since we’re in the business of flambéing tabloid-fodder celebs whenever we have the opportunity (though we must stress how much we also relish poking a stick in the common man’s ribs).
Chris remembers hearing Thriller for the first time at his cousin’s house and it blowing his mind. Noel remembers a running feud with an older neighbor kid who ridiculed him for saying (in the chirpish voice of youth) that Thriller and Bad were awesome. The neighbor insisted that Michael Jackson was just a poor man’s Lionel Richie and was not afraid of doling out a noogie to get his point across. (If that guy’s reading today, let’s just say that, Thriller, the best-selling album of all time – which in effect is an untouchable record because computer piracy has killed the album – well, it wasn’t put out by Lionel.) What we both remember are sounds that will forever be there in our minds. We think back to our childhoods and remember this music and – unlike the majority of 80s television and the second Terminator film – it stands the test of time, and we give ourselves credit for not having tin ears at that age.
It seems that if you’re a celebrity from a humble start, that included in the welcome gift bag you get upon entry into the club of the super fabulous is a posse of bloodsuckers incapable of giving advice other than “I think it’s time you sign the monthly pay slips, boss.” Throw in a mind that is not exactly a specimen of sound health and the results are inevitable – Howard Hughes insane and pissing in specimen bottles while his fortune crumbles, Mike Tyson boxing tomato cans for the minimal cash that’s in it, Michael Jackson building the Neverland Ranch, and inviting children into a world that screamed, “We find on behalf of the plaintiff”.
