[UPDATE below — scroll down…]
Thanks (I think) to the loyal 5FF reader who wants to mess with my head sent this in.
Chocolate. Ancient Aliens. “About 50 masks.”
Chronic.
This one stood out to my sender-inner:
Growing up, The Clash’s “Straight to Hell” was always our sing-along song while we washed the dishes. (Hi, Mom!)
“Straight to Hell” is one of those Clash songs that has no business “working.”
It’s Joe Strummer’s idea of post-war Vietnam based on getting baked and watching Apocalypse Now and that 60 Minutes segment on “half-bloods.”
But it makes you feel like you’re getting open heart surgery without quite enough anesthesia.
And somehow that’s your fault and you’re kind of embarrassed about it.
What a bastard.
Post-Clash, huge-crowd-of-Germans-perversely-decide-NOT-to-get-excited-for-once version, with bonus “I got the shoe!” coda:
UPDATE:
So another loyal 5FF reader reminds me about M.I.A.’s song “Paper Planes,” which samples “Straight to Hell” and was apparently a huge mainstream hit in a parallel universe.
“Paper Planes” is about growing up in the First World as a Third World immigrant and still being miserable or whatever.
Lots of critical bumph about “appropriation” and “colonialism” and “imperialism.”
So it’s pretty funny that every time this song gets bought or played on radio, Miss M.I.A. has to hand a percentage of her revenue over to a dead white male whose father was a British diplomat, and his living white male (half evil-JOOO! Boo!) Englishman songwriting partner.
BONUS hilarity:
The “Paper Planes” music video was censored by MTV in December 2007… In this version, M.I.A.’s vocals were doubled, the gun sounds replaced with popping sounds, and the word “weed” replaced with the word “seed”.
The producers of Pineapple Express asked for the word to be similarly changed before use, a request M.I.A. found “ridiculous, cause the whole movie’s about weed.”
