A few songs for April
Apr 02 '04
The Bottom Line Like I said, songs for Apr.
So far, life this year through music has been a bit depressing. However, this month, the Dream Dictionary brings me good news…
The month of April is a promise of good times and financial success.
About bloody time. So, time for some upbeat life-affirming odes to everything that is good and beautiful and successful. Now let me see, do I have any music like that…? Well, my one April song doesn’t really fit the bill…
April skies by Jesus & Mary Chain. Just introducing it, you know it’s all going wrong. 80’s drum machines kick in under a low chugging guitar. You feel like you’re in some kind of bizarre twisted 50’s song gone horribly wrong, with the light little melody knitting the song together.
I can’t help it
Under the April skies
Under the April sun
Sun grows cold
Sky gets black
And you broke me up
And now you won’t come back
Yup, it’s break-up song. Whilst it’s a great song (on the equally great Darklands album), it doesn’t really go with the upbeat theme, although musically it’s quite a toe-tapper. So, I tried to think of some light songs, but all I could come up with were novelty songs. Which suddenly made a lot of sense. After all, April is the month of fools, so maybe it’s time to remember a few of the jokes our many artists have played on us over the years.
Like Flash by Queen. Yes, it’s a song for the film soundtrack, but it’s still so inexcusably daft, so ridiculously grandiose and operatic, as to be impossible to consider as anything other than a joke. Especially when you intersperse the blasts of FLASH! Whoaaaa! with excerpts from the film, one that I doubt will be remembered for its eloquent and vibrant dialogue
Flash, Flash I love you! But we only have thirteen hours to save the earth!
Backtrack even further in time. The band that invented it all, also invented the novelty song. Yes, I speak of The Beatles, those four Liverpudlians, Monty Python fans one and all, the perpetrators of Revolution #9. The boys responsible for the bizarre characters that populated You know my name. But above all, the band that made a novelty song a hit. Yes, I speak of Yellow Submarine, possibly the most ridiculous song every to have been idolised, one of the songs least deserving of note, the last song you would want The Beatles to be remembered by. With Ringo on vocals (presumably the others all said, there is absolutely *no way* I am singing this), it’s a daft song about a community living in a submarine that is yellow. In the context of the movie of course it’s fun. But it’s also the most popular novelty song of all time.
Except possibly Obladi oblada. What? Oh come, on, it’s such a stupid bouncy little song, with such a ridiculously trite chorus. I am inherently suspicious of any song that they make you sing at school. I would at this point also like to make it perfectly clear that I love The Beatles as a general rule. But come on people…
But by no means are The Beatles the only ones to take self-indulgent trips into idiocy. In fact, Ben Folds Five made rather a career of it, particularly with the hilarious one minute stomp of Satan is my master.
Satan is my master
He has always been
He tells me what to do
He buys my Metallica records for me
From the lovely little piano and falsetto vocals, Ben launches the band into a piano led mock-metal stomp, and it’s fantastic. Almost as good is the daft little one-liner Rock this b!tch. Aaaah, college humour…
Sometimes the jokes come from the most unexpected places. The Cure don’t immediately suggest a sense of humour, but their eleven second version of Hello I love you is to The Doors what the Reduced Shakespeare Company is to Shakespeare. And songs like The Lovecats are arguably novelty songs for all the resemblance they bear to the main body of the band’s work.
The Stone Temple Pilots for instance, with Weiland’s numerous drug-related problems, as well as the harsh sound they cultivated over their first two albums. And yet and their Johnny Mathis inspired hidden track on Purple is the perfect example of a band recording a novelty song. Who knows what was going through their minds when they knocked off this second album song. Although in the case of Scott Weiland, it’s probably all too obvious what was going through his mind.
Sometimes the novelty song has a sting in the tail. In the case of My Vitriol, C.O.R. (Critic Orientated Rock) is an acerbic attack on critics guided not by artistic principles, but by some form of bizarre (and probably well-funded) fetish with the latest big thing. Stomping like a nu-metal monster, it’s a one minute indictment of establishment rock, and surprisingly good at that.
On other occasions, the next big thing happen to know they are going to be the next big thing. Such is the case of Brit rockers The Darkness, who have a career out of novelty-rock-songs. But their Christmas song is a particularly shameless example of silliness, Christmas Time (don’t let the bells end), a silly overwrought and unrelentingly likable stomp through the Christmas season with tongue held firmly in cheek. Some bands are certainly more than capable of making a career out of jokes – Weird Al of course, with his lyrically reworked alternative versions of hits. Barenaked Ladies are a little more subtle, but nevertheless, with their strong comical thrust, the guys like to keep you smiling. If I had $1.000.000 is the perfect loveable sing-along song.
If I had a million dollars
I’d buy you a fur coat
But not a real fur coat, that’s cruel
If I had a million dollars
I’d buy you an exotic pet
Like a lemur or an emu
…
If I had a million dollars
I’d be rich
How can you fail to like these guys? Lot’s of other bands have tried the comical song to varying degrees of success. Everclear and their moderately politicised Volvo driving soccer mom, or Weezer’s fairly stupid Sweater song.
In some cases, the novelty song is arrived at by mistake. R.E.M. and many other people may well regard Stand as a fairly normal sort of a song, but with its idiot-simple melody, and its idiot lyrics, it’s the perfect example of the song gone novelty. And let’s not even mention the idiot video for this song. Oops, too late. Blessed with a fantastic sense of humour, you’d have thought that R.E.M. wouldn’t feel compelled to try to be funny, but there you are. The mistake of such novelty songs is to confuse listeners with idiots. Move right along.
Likewise, Phil Collins’ Like China can be regarded as a failed attempt at doing something amusing. Admittedly, most people would regard his entire career as a novelty, but I have a soft spot for the man and enjoy his songs as a guilty pleasure. Phil is no stranger to singing silly characters, but his east-end persona on Like China is more cringe-worthy than anything else. Even worse is Whodunnit, in this case a Genesis tune. A variety of characters come forward chanting I didn’t do it, until someone says I did it or you stab your hi-fi with the Abacab cd-case, whichever event happens to come first. Dross, of the very worst sort. Food for Phil’s detractors, as if they needed excuses to hate the guy. Still, songs like these justify their position.
Phil isn’t the only man who is no stranger to the misguided joke-song scenario. In fact, the Goo Goo Dolls came up with one of the worst on their debut album, the reprehensible don’t beat my a$$ (with a baseball bat). The less said about this idiotic punk workout, the better. Although it’s also arguably the best thing on that debut album, and that’s saying something.
So, enjoy April people. Have some fun, laugh a little. After all, why not?
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A Few Songs for March
A Few Songs for February
A Few Songs for January
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Member: Simon
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