Sunday, August 30, 2009

Tuesday is recycling night!

It's fine to become a parent. It's fine to spend Saturday nights watching ABC and trawling through the used cars on drive.com.au looking for a little action (what all the tragically boring parents are doing this generation).

It's not fine to be hassled and haunted by this stupid song for a terrible, sanity-bleeding month some 15 or so years ago ...



... only to have the same Nightly Ghoul of Catchiness haunt me again in the following guise:



It turns out (from my two pieces of research) that all Flo Rida* does is raid the more excruciatingly tragic corners of my music collection for sugar-trash Euro-Disco - Exhibit A:



And rap over the top of it. Exhibit B:



Regardless of whether Kanye West had already dropped by a few years previously ...



... to purloin one of my top ten songs of all time:



All I have to do now is wait for Snoop to drop by with an ounce to trade for this little ditty:



Yes. I have this song.
Yes. I actually (used to) listen to it.

*But seriously, how pleased with himself must Flo Rida have been when he first thought up that name? I would love to have been there, just to watch that glimmer of realisation spread across his face. He'd be there, driving in a lowered cruiser, I imagine. Rolling around the streets of Miami and thinking about his desire to be a rapper and tossing up a few names.
"Big Banga? Nah ... T Dollaz? ... Hmm ... nah ..."
He'd pull up at the lights, along side a bus with a tourist bureau ad on it. "Florida is great!" reads the ad. Soon-to-be-Flo stares at the ad.
"Hey ... 'rida' ... like my ride here - "lo rida" ... heh ... thas' good ... hey ... Flo ... I flow ... my flow is the shit ... Flo ... rida ... Florida ... Flo ... rida ... Flo-rida ... Flo Rida."
He'd be like some Sesame Street Muppet slowly pushing two parts of a word together to make ... one meaning!
"FLO RIDA!" he would yell out. "FLO RIDA! YES!" He'd be beeping his horn, muppets would be waving their arms on little wires and bashing their furry heads up and down and singing songs about how words can be made up of other words.

It would be that awesome.

6 comments:

  1. Thank you for speaking out. I have been too scared to for fear of retribution.

    Top 10, yes. Although, to his credit, Kanye not only asked the Interstella duo to cameo in his film clip, but they also played live with him at the MTV awards last (this?) year. That makes it a collaboration, not a sample!

    PS, I personally HATE the one in my link..

    ReplyDelete
  2. ...Which is a rip of this classic funky Disco number from Chicago (see link).

    And wasn't this the music played in the background during WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS when Bear would say: "If you don't want to know the scores, look away now..."???

    ReplyDelete
  3. You poor, poor, tired man.

    Blue da ba dee was HUGE just after Sapphire was born and yes, I bought the CD (hah, what were downloads in 1999?) and used to hold her and dance around the house as she giggled and clapped her chubby little hands together!

    ReplyDelete
  4. TooS - I both can't and can easily believe that I'm the 45,254,099th person to watch that video clip. There's something to be said for big boobs, I suppose.

    *interesting factoid*: that guy came fourth in the Brasilian presidential elections last year.

    Kath - Oh you poor domesticated person. In 1999 yours was living in Belfast after a stint travelling trains around Europe ... and listening to my own CD single of 'Blue', which I would rip to my iTunes some years later.

    ReplyDelete
  5. "Muppets waving thier wire arms around".
    I could think of only one clip:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bCcLINwarY

    ReplyDelete
  6. Trent!!! I love you! I've been looking for this clip since I last saw it on rage in 1999!! Wow, 10 years ago...

    ReplyDelete

An explanation of The Joy Division Litmus Test

Although it may now be lost in the mysts of thyme, the poll below is still relevant to this blog. In the winter of 2008, Mele and I went to live in Queensland. In order to survive, I bluffed my way into a job at a Coffee Club.
It was quite a reasonable place to work: the hours were regular, the staff were quite nice, it wasn't particularly taxing on my brain.
There were a few downsides: In the six weeks or so that I worked there, there was about a 90% staff turnover (contributed to by my leaving). This wasn't seen as a result of the low pay, the laughability of staff prices or the practice of not distributing tips to staff, rather it was blamed on the lack of work ethic among Bribie Island's youth.
However, one of the stranger aspects of the cultural isolation that touched our lives during our time "up there" was the fact that nobody at my work had heard of the band Joy Division.
The full explanation is available here.
But please, interact a little further and vote in my ongoing poll. The results are slowly mounting up, proving one thing: people read this blog are more well-informed about Joy Division than anyone who works at the Coffee Club on Bribie Island.

Have you heard of the band Joy Division?

Chinese food, not Chinese Internet!

Champions of Guess The Header

  • What is Guess The Header about? Let’s ask regular “Writing” reader, Shippy: "Anyway, after Franzy's stunning September, and having a crack at 'Guess The Header' for the first time - without truly knowing what I was doing mind you - I think I finally understand what 'GTH' is all about. At first I thought you needed to actually know what it was. Don't get me wrong — if you know what it is, it may help you. I now realise that it's more Franzy's way of invoking thought around an image or, more often than not, part of an image. If you dissect slightly the GTH explanatory sentence at the bottom of his blog you come up with this: “The photo is always taken by me and always connects in some way to the topic of the blog entry it heads up.” When the header is put up, the blog below it will in some obscure way have something to do with it. “Interesting comments are judged and scored arbitrarily and the process is open to corruption and bribery with all correspondence being entered into after the fact and on into eternity, ad infinitum amen.” Franzy judges it, but it's not always the GTH that describes the place perfectly that gets it. “The frequent commenters, the wits, the wags and the outright smartarses who, each entry, engage to both guess the origin and relevance of the strip of photo at the top (or “head”) of each new blog and also who leave what I deem the most interesting comment.” It generally helps if you're a complete smartarse and can twist things to mean whatever you feel they should mean - exactly the way Franzy would like things to be twisted." - Shippy Blogger and GTH point scorer.
  • Nai - 1
  • Lion Kinsman - 2
  • Will - 2
  • Brocky - 2
  • Andy Pants - 2
  • The 327th Male - 3
  • Mad Cat Lady - 3
  • Miles McClagen - 4
  • Myninjacockle - 4
  • Asheligh - 5
  • Neil - 5
  • Third Cat - 5
  • Adam Y - 6
  • Squib - 6
  • Mele - 6
  • Moifey - 7
  • Jono - 8
  • The Other, other Sam - 14
  • Kath Lockett - 15
  • Shippy - 19
  • River - 32