Continuing the tracklist of the 32nd in-car
compilation I created to introduce my son Sam to as wide a variety of pop music
as possible… this one from about 5 or 6 years ago, I’m guessing.
5. The Who - Won't Get Fooled Again
“Meet the new boss – same as the old boss.” Is that the best
line Pete Townsend ever wrote? I’d be tempted to say it ties with “I was born
with a plastic spoon in my mouth”. The line itself sounds anti-establishment
(indeed, I used it prominently in my old comic strip The Jock), but Townsend
himself is a conservative who apparently sneered at the hippy idealism of the
Woodstock generation because he didn’t think they’d do any better than the people in power.
“As an English teacher though…” I always try to argue that
there’s a clear divide between an author’s intent and the way readers choose to
interpret, and that the latter will generally become the accepted reading. The
only way to stop that happening is a) be blatantly transparent and leave no
room for ambiguity in your writing (boring!) or b) stop letting anyone read /
listen to it.
Rather than being an anti-establishment rant though, Won’t
Get Fooled Again speaks more to a cynical detachment from the whole political
process – a sense that whoever’s in charge, they’ll fuck it up or put their own
selfish needs ahead of the public at large. In that, it’s more appropriate
today than it ever was.
I’ve probably mentioned this before, but my Dad was never a
fan of rock music. He’d be in his late 20s when rock ‘n’ roll broke, so too old
for the teenage rebellion of it. He was a Frank Sinatra man through and
through. But in his latter years, he came round to The Who, only because this –
and a couple of their other hits – were used as theme tunes to the myriad of
CSI shows he used to watch. He was less impressed with their Glastonbury
performance in 2015 though – “bloody racket!”
6. Prince - Little Red Corvette
A few weeks back when I did the Snapshots about Synonyms For
Sex, I put Prince at the top of the page, because… well, every Prince song is
about sex in one way or another, and most of them don’t even try to disguise
the fact. (Despite Gett Off being in my Top 5 Prince songs, I don’t think I’ll
ever have the nerve to include it on one of Sam’s compilations… especially now
he’s knocking on the door of teenagerdom.)
Little Red Corvette is about a one-night stand, but it’s not
just a song about shagging. There’s an undercurrent of vulnerability,
awkwardness, embarrassment even that often made Prince’s sexy songs more
layered than a lot of 80s cock-rock records. And it also has that cheeky humour
that allowed Prince to get away with stuff other lyricists would have been
called out for.
I guess I should have known By the way you parked your car sideways That it wouldn’t last.
I love those opening lines. You’re hot, I’ll definitely
sleep with you, but there’s no way we’re having a meaningful relationship when
you can’t even park your car straight.
Despite all the barely-concealed euphemism in this song, I had no compunctions about including it on a compilation aimed at a seven-year-old, because… it’s a car song,
right? That’s all. Just a song about a car. And Sam’s favourite movie series when
he was little was Pixar’s Cars, so there were a lot of car songs on these CDs.
Plus, car songs are made for driving, right?
(I read a great article about Little Red Corvette while
compiling this piece. I could have quoted it extensively, but in the end I
decided just to post
a link.)
7. The Wedding Present - Kennedy
There aren’t many tracks on the early volumes which will impress the average Peel fan, but this was a good one
to get Sam into because of it’s catchy “too much apple pie” refrain. Can
you ever have too much apple pie? Clearly the answer is no… unless it’s
metaphorical apple pie… in which case…
I hate the phrase “I was today years old when I learned...” Hate it with a passion. Especially since I heard a DJ say it on ASDA FM this
morning. However, despite joyfully singing along to this tune for many, many
years, it was only today that I stopped to ask myself why David Gedge called it Kennedy. I just took it to be another Classic Wedding Present
Kitchen Sink Relationships Gone Wrong ™ Song. I didn’t ever consider that “And
now Harry's walked away with Johnny's wife” might actually be “And now Ari's
walked away with Johnny's wife”, that being Aristotle Onassis. And if you go
down that route, the subsequent lines, “But if Lee's name does come up, oh well, I really want to know” take us way beyond the regular Wedding Present milieu,
don’t they?
Too much apple pie, indeed.
8. Jackson Browne - Doctor My Eyes
Why didn’t you put the cover version by The Jackson 5 on,
Rol? Surely that’s likely to be more appealing to your target audience than the
original?
Hmm. Yeah. I s’pose. But it’s one of those times that the perky
little kid vocals grate on me. That’s not always the case with The Jacksons – I
won’t have a word said against ABC or I Want You Back – but it is here. And
besides, the lazy sunshiney Laurel Canyon vibe of early 70s Jackson Browne is
just too much for an old man to resist. Plus, for a song that the interweb
tells me is about disillusionment and loss of innocence, I’m not sure a
15-year-old vocalist can properly do it justice. Then again, Jackson Browne was
only 24 when he wrote this, so hardly a G.O.M. And maybe that ironic
juxtaposition was the point of the cover version. Or maybe Michael's Dad just
liked getting his kids to sing songs by other artists called Jackson (see also Blame
It On The Boogie).
Give yourself a good laugh and watch that video if you've not seen it in awhile. Kenny Everett springs to mind.
Not only that, but it's National Coconut Torte Day. A day to contemplate sit in the dessert which "sits in that delicious gray area between cake and pastry: rich like a cake, structured like a layer dessert, and often dressed up enough to look like it belongs in a bakery window."
I don't think I've ever eaten a coconut torte. Have I been missing out.
It's National Jewel Day too - I did my quiz about jewels this week, but it wasn't a particularly interesting subject so I won't bother you guys with it.
It's also (no, I'm not making any of these up): National Earmuff Day, International Riesling Day, National Open An Umbrella Indoors Day (on Friday the 13th... are you mad!?!), National Freelancers Day and World Sleep Day.
But all of these wonderful celebrations are trumped (I don't like using that verb any more, even in terms of metaphorical card games) by the aforementioned Bad Luck Friday... our second in a row, thanks to February's insistence on being exactly four weeks long (most of the time).
Actually, there are surprisingly few decent songs about Friday 13th. Thank god then for little Bob Smith, who's clearly having another Bad Hair Day in this video... no change there then.
Welcome back to the Cancel Culture Club, where a team of opinionated bloggers decide whether songs from years gone by, which contain outdated attitudes, deserve casting into the pit of oblivion.
This time, we have a tune most people appear to have forgotten (or never heard before) anyway. Perhaps I should have left it languishing in obscurity... but where would the fun be in that?
From Washington DC and Maryland in the year of 1975, I give you the Moments and the Whatnauts with a minor US hit... that for some reason climbed to #3 in the UK charts.
We'll kick off today with a new member of the CCCC, SWC from NBR. That's No Badger Required for those of you who aren't down with the initialisms.
Excellent.
First time, genuinely, I've ever heard it. The line "the ones who ain't good looking do the best cooking" is standing out....
It's not aged well.
Remember folks, one word or a hundred thousand, all replies are welcome here, and what I liked about SWC's pithy response was how much he appeared to enjoy hearing this deeply un-pc ditty for the first time. Because there is a great deal of pleasure to be had from relishing the amusement value of outdated attitudes, as JC from The Vinyl Villain clearly agrees. "I'm enjoying this in a strangely masochistic way," he confessed when he sent me his response...
When the details of the latest CCC consideration dropped in, my immediate reaction was ‘Who?’ as Moments and Whatnauts meant absolutely nothing to me. I clicked on the link kindly provided by Rol, and that’s when I discovered a vague recollection of the actual song, but you could have genuinely given me an infinite number of guesses as to the performers…..even if it had been a game of ‘fill in the blanks’.
I’d have been not too far short of my 12th birthday when this was getting played on the radio. I’ve checked the chart the week that ‘Girls’ reached #3 (23 March 1975) and while I can still sing all the words to the chorus of that week’s #1 (‘Bye Bye Baby’ by the Bay City Rollers), I couldn’t do likewise for the Moments and Whatnauts effort.
My biggest issue with the song, from my musical snobbery perspective, is that it’s very derivative of the sort I really hated back in the 70s, the genre I would later learn is a cross between R&B and soul of whom The Stylistics were probably the most successful at the time. Having listened to it three times to help make a contribution, I’d be more than happy never to hear it ever again, but would I go as far as calling for it to be cancelled?
I feel I must butt in at this point and remind the committee that we're not judging these tracks on own specific musical tastes. That way lies madness. There's no place for musical snobbery in the CCCC - unless it involves slagging off Bono. Sorry, JC, I interrupted you mid-flow...
By any standard, the lyrics are quite pathetic, with the main verse sounding like the ideal storyline for those dreadful 70s sex comedies which starred one or other woefully talentless and less than handsome comic actors who, for some inexplicable reasons, always had a bevvy of buxom beauties chasing them around bedrooms and/or bathrooms, often in a state of undress.
There is no question at all that ‘Girls’ has lyrics that weren’t out of sync with so much that was going on in popular culture in the 70s, be that music, TV or cinema. Nowadays, many people would call it, and so much more from that era, as sexist rubbish – and rightly so; but so much of it is infantile and the stuff of total fantasy which makes the song more to be pitied and laughed at than despised and possibly cancelled.
Thank you, JC, for concluding, like SWC, that the best way to respond to these outdated attitudes is to chortle at them.
This is going to be quite brief, I'm afraid, as I'm spectacularly time-poor at the moment.
Bear that in mind, folks. This is Martin being brief...!
This is a song I can't remember ever hearing before and, to be honest, would happily never hear again. Musically unremarkable but of its time - disco is hoving into view, no doubt - so maybe it would be okay if you didn't listen to the lyrics. But what about those lyrics?
Girls
I like 'em fat, I like 'em tall
Some skinny, some small
I got to get to know them all
Okay, so not very PC, and clearly not discerning... but not the first (or last) song to conjure lyrics out of an appetite for the opposite sex. Indeed, later than this James Brown's Mother Popcorn had some very similar sentiments (and it's Brown's song that Prince references later still in Gett Off). And we can't really be concerned about fat-shaming here, not when the band seem to celebrating all sizes (much like Queen's Fat-Bottomed Girls, perhaps). But what about this?
I think it's fair to say that Fat Bottomed Girls will never be offered up for consideration here, for two very simple reasons: 1) I love it; 2) I'm aware that the majority of the Committee hates Queen and so would never be able to give it the impartial consideration it deserves.
I'd like to be on an island With five or six of them fine ones Even one that ain't good lookin'
They're the ones that do the best cookin'
Polygamy, stereotyping and sweeping generalisations. Very poor. And that's before we get to:
Give me three that do them freaky things
Give me four fat mamas that like to swing
Oh, and don't forget the unfortunate imagery and crude (in both senses) metaphor:
I'd like to be a magician
Then I could stop wishin'
I'd take my magic wand
And, puff, I'd have big fun
Yeah, but if Prince had written that - and he's certainly skirted close from time to time - I for one would be defending him to the hilt.
There are probably more songs in the 20th Century pop lexicon about sex - getting and having - than just about any other subject, and this is just another example. It's crass, poorly written, cliched, and dumb... but was anyone offended by it at the time? Probably not, as we have established, the past is a very different country. Would a contemporary listener find it offensive? There's a good chance of that - the girls of the title would be offended, and the boys would find it offensive as a means of impressing or gaining favour with the girls. Or is that me being a cynical boy?
I'm not sure, Martin. Take a sample rap or r'n'b lyric from the past thirty years and you might find the past isn't such a different country after all...
As for me, I'm all for cancelling this, not (just) because the lyrics are dated, disrespectful and offensive, but mostly because it's just crap. Maybe someone could use AI to remove all the vocals, and just leave us with a pleasant soul groove?
And don't start me on AI... you know how I come out in a rash.
Of a similar mind to Martin, and even more time poor at the moment, so I greatly appreciate his response, here's Charity Chic...
Thankfully I was not previously familiar with this song.
They start with an assurance that they have no issues with height of weight. So far so good.
Then it goes fairly rapidly downhill.
They then blot their copybook when it comes to good looking and cooking and don't get me started on freaky things!
There are probably far worse examples out there.
A quick Google trawl does not raise any objections that I can see.
It will after today!
I'm sure that absolutely no concerns were raised in 1974 but I suspect it wouldn't see the light of day now given that it is pretty sexist.
Again, I'm not so sure about that, CC. But I don't want to go swimming about in the sea of misogynistic filth that is the 'Bitches and Bling' genre to find more recent comparisons.
To be fair, that is from 1992 (over thirty years ago... shudder), so we can't really judge it by contemporary mores. Kind of makes the Moments and Whatnauts seem sweet in comparison though, don't you think?
Back to CC...
It is also of its time (not that that is necessarily a good thing).
I'm pretty sure if you banned this one you would have to ban a whole lot more.
I would just let it fade into oblivion!
And maybe we'll do just that... after we've had a good laugh at it first. And here to do just that is Swiss Adam from Bagging Area...
That was an entertaining few minutes. A very 1975 sounding piece of soul, not surprised it was a hit (number 3 and number 1 in the Netherlands). The lyrics are a bit dated but many things from 1975 are. I'm sure the lyrics are sexist, but if he's saying he likes all girls, at least he's not leaving anyone out (reminds me of a scene from Seinfeld where Jerry was accused of being racist for expressing his liking of Native American women. 'How can it be racist if I like them?' he asked). If anything, part of me admires the stamina of the singer/ lyricist - his desire for more than one girl, 'four or five that like to swing', is brave. Or foolhardy.
You get to a certain age and you do start to wonder where bigamists and philanderers get the energy from...
The line about the ones that do the cooking is very mid-70s sexism but it's a little tongue in cheek and I don't think it warrants the cancellation of this song - the song isn't that offensive and is a period piece if nothing else.
Thank you, Adam. From Manchester to Baden-Württemberg, there appears to be a broad sense of agreement about this song. Here's Walter from A Few Good Times In My Life...
With this song, Rol, you've hit the nail on the head. A cheerful-sounding song from the early seventies, which is actually just a lukewarm and silly soul-funk track that pretends to celebrate women. But as you mentioned, we should appreciate the lyrics in today's context.
By today's standards, women are reduced to minimalism here and obviously reduced to their adjectives (“lovely and good lookin', the kind that does the best cookin'”). Lou Bega also proved in the 1990s with Manbo No. 5 that songs with this kind of content repeatedly become hits. I can't listen to these songs anymore because they are far too superficial. There are reasons why you should record an instrumental if you can't come up with any decent lyrics.
You know, Walter, I don't think I ever paid any attention to the lyrics of Mambo No. 5, but now that you point it out, it does appear to be a distant cousin of Girls, twenty years later.
Anyway, it looks like we're all on the same page here, doesn't it? Nobody's going to upset the applecart this week. Oh look, here's Ernie from 27 Leggies...
I know what you are trying to do in your sneaky way. You are trying to trick the male Club members into mansplaining to the female Club members why they should or should not be offended by this song. Well, I'm not falling for it.
I can see that the song may be offensive but don't really feel qualified to say where exactly it should be placed on the Cancel-o-meter. In any event it will be much more interesting and relevant to hear the views of Alyson, C and any other women commentators.
Must dash, I have a doctor's appointment. Three nights ago I was at a disco bumping with a big fat woman and she done hurt my hip. Never again!
Putting aside Ernie's infuriating habit of spoilering future editions of this feature, he is right to point out that we've yet to hear from either of our female committee members. However, I take umbrage at his suggestion that I'm trying to incite a round of mansplaining... mainly because I have a devil of a time understanding just what that means. Being a big dumb bloke, that is.
Fortunately, there were some lovely ladies here that I was able to ask. So, C, from Sun Dried Sparrows... please can you explain "mansplaining" to me (and Ernie)?
Mansplaining: The instance in which a person in possession of the XY combination of chromosomes presupposes that they have superior comprehension of a subject, frequently a moderately rudimentary one, to that of a female with whom they are communicating, based primarily on the mere differentiation between their respective genders, thus conveying the relative information in a manner which may be considered to be substantially condescending. Let me re-phrase that for you: It's when a bloke thinks he's better than a bird just because he's got a willy.
No, I didn't quite get that. I better ask Alyson, to see if she can tell me What's It All About?
I could be jumping from the frying pan into the fire with this, but Rol has asked the female members of the CCC to explain the word mansplaining to him, as it had been suggested that the male members might be being tricked into doing just that in their responses re: the song, Girls.
First of all, it was a while before I caught on to what mansplaining was, as at first I thought it was that practice whereby men sit on public transport and on long benches with their legs spread at 90 degrees. If you’re a woman sitting next to them your space is severely encroached upon and if you’re sitting opposite them, it’s just a bit too much for the eyes to take, especially if they’re dressed in a kilt. But no, at around the same time the word mansplaying came into being to describe that behaviour and I kept mixing the two up.
So, what is mansplaining from a woman’s perspective? As ever I have one of my anecdotes to fall back on which is quite timely as it turns out. Many years ago, when I first started going out with Mr WIAA, we were invited to his friend’s wedding in York. We went with another mutual friend and his wife in their car, and at one point during that long journey it came up in conversation that the clocks were to change that weekend. The mutual friend who was driving explained that the clocks would be going forward to make it lighter in the morning (this was long before we started to associate Autumn with Fall in the UK, which now helps no end with remembering which way the clocks go). I of course piped up that it was the opposite, the clocks would be going back to make it lighter in the morning, but I was overridden by the mutual friend who very condescendingly told me that I was wrong, and he was right. I didn’t want to start an argument and be left having to hitchhike to York, so let it go. Needless to say, when we got to the hotel that evening and went to bed, we had a lovely extra hour in bed but the friend and his wife got up two hours early and couldn’t understand why breakfast wasn’t being served. I think he tried the same thing often with his wife and needless to say they got divorced a few years later.
I am pleased to report that I have never experienced an iota of mansplaining since I started blogging, despite that fact I know so much less about music that our fine band of male bloggers. I know Mr WIAA would never resort to it and back in the workplace I was surrounded by mainly female colleagues, so it was never a problem.
I do hope this bit of femalesplaining has helped, Rol, and that I haven’t dug myself a bigger hole!
No. Still not getting it. Perhaps I really am a big dumb bloke. Perhaps I should have asked Ernie in the first place?
Or perhaps I should realise I've pushed this bit as far as I can... but before I get back to the fairer sex and ask them their opinion of Girls, I figured now would be the time to bring in our infamous contrarian, George from Portugal (that's a place, not a blog) and see if he's been singing our latest offering while wandering the fields of his adopted homeland. Surely not...?
I am going to start with the song itself, without considering the lyrics too deeply. I distinctly remember this song, and the 12 year-old me was not a fan. And 50 years later I’m still not a fan, although thanks to bloody Rol I’ve been singing it to the goats today. So it’s not only good pop songs that have a catchy lyric but this load of old bobbins too - it’s just dreary, a bland vocal, no musical highlights, it just strolls along with its idiotic lyric. Somehow this drivel got to number three in the charts (the nos. 1 and 2 were worse, can you believe it?)
I checked, and as well as the aforementioned Bay City Rollers, the other two songs which prevented this getting any higher in the chart were...
And frankly, I can see what possible problem George could have with either of those classics. But I digress...
I’d like to think no-one would write such a lyric today but I suppose there are plenty of songs out there glorifying violence and revelling in sexism or misogyny - and I think the reason “Girls” is up for discussion this week is the sexism of the lyrics.
So I’ve listened to it again. And after the opening few lines I wondered what Rol’s problem was. It’s a bit crass, but it’s an inclusive lyric “Girls, I like them all…fat ….tall…..skinny…small.”. So far so, well not good, but nothing to object to. First verse….something about an island with some attractive young women and then oh dear, someone who” ain’t good looking” to do the cooking - that’s just not nice, it’s nasty. I couldn’t make out the rest of that verse. On to the next one, and there’s some singing about a magician and his magic wand, which made me laugh, although maybe the metaphor was unintended, and the rest of the song meandered meaninglessly on. I’ve not looked at the lyric, and the singer seems to think he’s god’s gift to women. Well, maybe he is, but it’s a rather crude, sexist and juvenile way of putting it. Especially that Magic Wand verse.
This song, apart from denigrating people who in the writers’ view are not worthy regarding their looks, puts them in their rightful place: the kitchen. Damn right! It’s not as in-your-face-crude as Prince Charles and The City Beat Band (“shake it don’t break it 38-24-36…I like……..big chested girls” - I’ve got the album by the way). I say No To Cancelling. Because if this is cancelled then Sir Mix A Lot would have to go too and THAT is a fantastic song.
Thank you, George. That makes me feel a little bit better about defending Fat Bottomed Girls.
And now, the moment you've all been waiting for. You may recall that in the first edition of this series, I mentioned how I'd invited my sociologist friend Ben to chip in with an academic's perspective on our musical minefield. Well, Ben has finally got off his arse found a gap in his hectic intellectual schedule and chipped in with an opinion on this week's tune.
Strap in folks, and remember the academic mantra: never use 5 words when 500 will do.
It's a great pop song. That's not up for debate.
Well, I think it probably is, considering some of the responses we've just read. Still, moving on...
However it's not to say that it doesn't carry negative imagery. I think you'd be hard pressed to find one that doesn't have some form of cultural bias or structural inequality in them.
Compared to the culturally accepted noncery of Young Girl and the Oriental othering of Turning Japanese, this one has less of what might be called overtly harmful imagery than the previous two. But, as a sociologist whose personal work centres on harm as a concept, it is still harmful. Zemiology, a relatively young social science sub-discipline--from the Greek Zemia, meaning harm--seeks to understand what negates and limits an individual in society. It's not an overarching philosophical idea but a framework that helps us to identify the negative impacts of societal structures as being the true driver and origin of harmful effects, rather than just the actions of one individual to another.
I would at this point like to remind the committee, specifically those who thought Ben was a creation of my own fevered imagination, back in the days of my regular Conversations With Ben series during lockdown... that, well, he's not. He's a real person. And whatever skills I may or may not possess as a writer, I couldn't have written the previous paragraph. This is the real deal, folks. Pure, unfiltered Ben.
In Girls, there is a type of harm readily apparent: the objectification of women and their reduction to either what value they bring the narrator or what pleasure he derives from their appearance. Or, harms of recognition.
It's OK, I didn't understand a lot of that either.
When we speak about objectification women, we often see the most obvious stereotypes of them as looking like a Barbie doll or whatever is currently seen as a peak of beauty -- but the idea of a tanned, skinny, large chested woman as an ideal only really comes about in the 1970s as beauty standards tend to follow an idea of what is a woman who has infinite downtime; in the 16th-17th century, obese, pale women were seen as an ideal beauty as they were not workers tending the fields building muscle mass. What objectification is at its most base form is the reduction of an individual from a complex individual into only superficial facets of their identity. Hegel and his philosophical work on recognition gives us the starting point to understand how this works. In his Master/Slave dynamic, what he sees (wrong to an extent, as he reduces the relationship to purely cultural and ignores the economic one, but it takes me 45 minutes in a lecture theatre to cover these intricacies of the employment relationships of slaves*) is that it is the fight to be recognised that limits the slave's ability to be a complete person; they are reduced to singular facets. They are their worth only to the master, what they can provide to their master, whereas the master is a complete and complex individual.
*Tickets still available. Contact me if anyone's interested. I can do you a very good price.
The way the girls in this song are seen by their physical appearance seems on an initial read to be inclusive. Body positivity wins out. Or does it? Their height and their weight determine their worth in this scenario. Their lived experiences, personalities and achievements are of no interest. Indeed, even modifications to their scent through the use of perfume is deemed as something that would make the narrator love them.
Underscoring this is the negative impact that this ever present representation of women has on society. It limits, as Pemberton says, self-actualisation as this is internalised by those harmed and they too must take part in the repeated harms. The makeup industry, weight industry and diet industry heavily rely on this continuing to add billions to the economy every year. It is in the economy's interest that it continues.
It's not that Ben. I promise.
But there are other aspects that their worth is judged on, and this is whether it will satiate the narrator. Again, reducing it to a singular facet. Whether they can sexually please him more than others, whether they can ply him with good meals, whether they can financially support him, and whether they are willing to take part in sexual fantasies including exclusively other women (which in turn maintains the power dynamics--I'm being heavily reductive here, but Foucault suggests at the end of The History of Sexuality Volume 1 that we can overcome gender roles by essentially just taking part in one great big orgy). Again, it is only their worth by his needs.
Bloody Foucault. I always thought he was a perv. Him and his pendulum.
That this is a standard turn in a pop song demonstrates that it's not just the Whatnauts and Moments that value women along these lines, and that it is seen as standard and accepted gives us a starting point to see how this is embedded in the very structures of society. It is not just the band here that are doing this, it is ingrained in society. Noir books and cinema are rife with women depicted in this way, giving us an insight into whether they are good or bad people. Similarly, the extensive use of women in factory work during the Second World War as a way to increase economic output during wartime who were then weeded out and sent back to the home to be mothers and housewives when immigrants could be paid less shows the consistent undermining of their value. We can begin to see then that even attempts to parody and make these songs more inclusive still fall into the same trap: see All the Ladies by Flight of the Conchords.
OK, enough of the patriarchy. I've made the women wait long enough to have their say. Mainly because I was wary of saying "Ladies first," and falling foul of male chauvinist pig accusations.
OK, C, what's bothering your pretty little head when it comes to the Moments and Whatnauts?
Thanks for sending us the latest song, and one which doesn't have me feeling anywhere near as anxious as the last one!
I don't feel I need to spend too long on this little ditty - because I just can't take it seriously! I caught the Top of The Pops performance of it not that long ago (I think it was on one of the BBC4 repeats, but I couldn't swear to it) and, honestly, it just made me laugh. The reason being - it's just too over-the-top. It's so over-the-top that it could be a parody. It's a very light melody and the lyrics are so corny and so bad that I really don't feel it merits any lengthy analysis.
Of course the words, if taken absolutely literally, scream "sexist", "stereotype", etc. - and I'm sure my mouth opened a little and my eyes widened as I absorbed them with a slight sense of disbelief what I was hearing - because I had forgotten it. But, at the same time, I couldn't help laughing at the ridiculousness of it all. It's just too simplistic, too immature to give weight to! I watched the audience of young girls in the TotP audience happily dancing away to the song and I thought, I don't even think anyone there would have cared or felt belittled or bothered either, unlikely to ever let such clichéd, exaggerated sentiments expressed in this song with its light melody and ineffectual vocals, define or affect them or their ambitions negatively. As for those smiling lads in the band delivering these naive declarations, I just thought: oh boys, boys! You've SO much to learn!
Can't disagree with any of that, C - especially your conclusion. For example, I've yet to learn how to make a decent cup of tea. Any chance you could rustle one up for me?
(That last comment was clearly meant as a joke. I can't stand tea.)
And now we move on to the second of our lovely ladies, Alyson. Let's see if she's got her knickers in a twist over all this nonsense?
Here we are with yet another big hit from yesteryear that just doesn’t sit nicely with our 21st century sensibilities, although I am coming round to thinking I wouldn’t actually vote to cancel/ban anything from back in the day unless it had been written with mal-intent, and again I’m pretty sure this song wasn’t.
Coincidentally, I have listened to the song, Girls, relatively recently, as Rol had shared a snapshot of The Moments on his regular Saturday feature back in April. It wasn’t until I saw that picture that I realised The Moments and Whatnauts weren’t actually one group, but made up of two (I was only 14 when they hit our UK Singles Chart). I was reminded of their pretty song from 1975 and sought it out on YouTube. It’s still got a beautiful melody, especially the chorus, but when you listen to the lyrics in the verses nowadays, they do make you wince. But why, I hear you ask?
Right from the get-go, the singer is explaining to his friends that he doesn’t like only one kind of girl but all sorts of girls, even fat ones and skinny ones. Back in 1975 I wasn’t offended by these adjectives at all as to be quite honest:
No-one I knew was fat, and no-one I knew was battling a weight problem. In 1975 the few people who were classed as fat probably did suffer and were bullied in the playground, but the vast majority of us wouldn’t have seen it as a word to cause distress. Sadly, our food industry over the last 50 years has not been kind to us and today’s average woman is what we would call curvy, or plus-size. The f-word is no longer used as an adjective to describe someone.
That's interesting. So when Ben said earlier that, "the idea of a tanned, skinny, large chested woman as an ideal only really comes about in the 1970s", it sounds like this happened later than 1975. In that case, I'm blaming Charlie's Angels.
We did have a few girls at school who were really skinny but some of them were also really sporty, so it made sense. Back then we hadn’t heard of the term anorexia so wouldn’t have considered that some of them might have had a serious problem that needed sorting out by medical professionals. Again, the vast majority of us would have just used that word to describe someone thin.
As we get into the main body of the song, it becomes clear that our singer is on a roll, listing all the different kinds of girls he would surround himself with if on a desert island. Again, at age 14, I wouldn’t have known about girls that had “lots of honey”, “did freaky things”, or “liked to swing” (I was a naïve teenager). I did however know about girls that weren’t good lookin’, as again, back in 1975, none of us were. As Mr WIAA and I often recall, in each year we had a couple of naturally stunning girls, but the vast majority of us had short mousey hair, pale white skin and no make-up whatsoever. We knew where we stood.
Now, as an adult I realise the songwriters were really objectifying women in this song, but heck, this was the era of Miss World Contests, the Page 3 girl, and nude calendars in every workplace. Nearly every male openly objectified women.
Then again, at least 70s blokes were open about it. Nowadays we have to repress it and pretend it isn't part of our genetic make-up.
To sum up, I don’t think this song has aged well and although I don’t think it should be cancelled/banned, I don’t think it should be played anymore on the radio or in public. The irony of course is that in the last 50 years, although our language has become more sensitive, and we no longer have beauty pageants on prime-time telly, the objectification of both women and men is still very much alive and well. You could even say the future of the human race depends on it. Men still fantasise about their perfect woman and women drool over Channing Tatum in Magic Mike. The whole Love Island reality show model is very popular, and there is no shortage of good-looking young adults who sign up for it.
Phew, I'm glad you said that, Alyson. I was worried I'd stuck my neck out with my previous remark.
Final anecdote. I quite recently went to see a show at our local theatre based on the film The Full Monty. I had seen the film when it came out in 1997 and loved the story of how six unemployed former steel workers have this idea to form a male striptease act in order to make some money – it was really funny. Sadly, I think some of the women who came to see the show were a bit ill-informed as to how it would go and thought they were coming to see The Chippendales. Four women in front of us arrived drunk and were really lairy throughout the first half. They all had half-bottles in their bags and one of them was sick in the aisle. The front-of-house ladies were too afraid to tackle their behaviour in case they exacerbated the situation. Needless to say, come the moment, the one the ladies had been waiting for, there was no full monty so you can imagine the taunts that came from them. It was all really embarrassing and just showed how the objectification of both men and women still goes on and probably always will.
I won’t even get started on rap lyrics as I have been led to believe, they make Girls, seem really tame.
Again, I will be really interested to read everyone else’s views.
All of which leaves us to a bigger question - has the pendulum (not Foucault's) swung too far in the opposite direction now, leaving us with a world where it's OK for women to be openly lascivious and critical of the male sex in a way that only were allowed to be... whereas if men behave this way, they can be shamed and shunned. And has this reverse of attitudes led to the rise of Incel Culture and the utterly abysmal Manosphere?
Won't have a word said against that, John. It's a bit of class. Sorry, please go on...
It has no redeeming features. There aren't enough levels this can be wrong on. If you want to sabotage a radio station and get them closed down, just ask them to play this.
Sorry, I'm just on the phone to Vernon Kaye.
'But John,' I hear you say, 'It was the 70s. This was standard fare back then.' Oh, alright then, I'll let it pass. (Groan.)
And so we reach the end of the latest edition of Cancel Culture Club other than to thank all the participants for the time and effort they've put it - it goes above and beyond what I was expecting when I proposed this feature, and I hope you find it all as fascinating, enlightening and amusing as I do.
All that's left is for me to take my magic wand and poof, have me some fun. Oh look, I've got ten girls sitting next to me! But as Swiss Adam suggested earlier... I'm not sure I have the stamina for that sort of nonsense any more. (Never did, to be honest.) I'd rather go listen to some tunes...
After last week's post about my old Chemistry teacher, Mr. Dowling, Brian commented...
I took the bare minimum of sciences in high school and college out of pure laziness. The only teacher I remember from those classes was Mrs. Fischer, for reasons that had nothing to do with class content.
All of which brings us to the thorny issue of fancying your teacher... something which I have more songs about that any other issue in school...
Now I may be misremembering here, but the only teacher I can recall who made me come over all Prince...
...was Miss Crosby from the Art Department. The "Miss" was important, I'm sure.
There were three art teachers I remember from school. Miss Roche wore dungarees and also taught what would now be called CDT. The big thing I remember from her lessons was making a letter opener out of blue Perspex... an object which would have high demand as a shank in any prison in the country. I still have that letter opener today, though it gets far less use than it did in the 80s and 90s. I don't even shank people with it any more.
And then there was Miss Crosby, the archetypal "fit" teacher. That word seems rather archaic now - do people still say "fit"? It was the 80s and we were teenage lads. Everyone fancied Miss Crosby. I think it's fair to say that she was a big factor in my choosing to continue doing Art at A Level, even though I only got a C in GCSE.
I didn't do very well at A Level Art (I got an E). Partly because the Art department expected you to spend all your time doing Art when I was far more focussed on my primary subjects (English Language & Literature). Don't take A Level Art as a third option. Nobody will thank you for it. And that's where I saw another side of Miss Crosby too - she could be lovely to those kids who spent every lunchtime in the Art room working on their projects... but those of us with less commitment, she tended to shun.
Also, we tended to see far less of Miss Crosby once we started A Levels (it was almost like she'd laid a honey trap and now we were caught in it - and the numbers for A Level art were good! - then her work was done). Instead, most of our lessons seemed to be with the third member of the Art Department, Mrs. Birkenshaw, an older lady who dressed liked Crystal Carrington in Dynasty (shoulder pads were big at the time, and no bigger than on Mrs. Birkenshaw). You could always tell she was coming from a mile off because her appearance was heralded by a choking cloud of Calvin Klein's Obsession... though she was no Isabella Rossellini.
We used to stand in the corridor as she passed, humming the theme tune to Dynasty as loud as we could get away with... I don't think she ever twigged. Or maybe she did, and liked the attention.
There's a lesson to be had here about the futility of fancying your teacher... but I doubt any of you need to be taught it. And just imagine what it's like to be on the other side of that equation...
Back in July 2021, we did an edition of Snapshots about song titles which featured the name of the singer or band performing them. It was high time for a sequel...
20. Like a Sonic Youth offshoot.
Ciccone Youth was a side-project of Sonic Youth. This is Louise Ciccone, first name...
