Before you begin to read, please be aware that this is by way of a tirade, a polemic, a philippic, a jeremiad, a diatribe… or, put more simply (for the benefit of any sad souls who do not nibble a thesaurus between meals) a rant. And it will most probably involve terms of execration, revilement, vilification, vituperation and, last but by no means least, invective—all aimed at the members of that dire tribe of marketing idiots who insist on trying to sell me something which I do not wish to buy. I refer, of course, to that well-known quadrennial celebration of running round in circles, leaping up and down, and splashing about in water which is commonly known as The Olympic Games.
Please don’t misunderstand me: two of my most heartfelt tenets are—and, I trust, shall ever remain—Live and let live and Whatever turns you on. So if some people wish to engage in the (to my mind) rather peculiar activity of thumping a football from one end of a small, man-made lake to the other for an hour or so, then all well and good. Let them indulge their harmless passion, say I. Nor do I much care that other (again, to my mind) equally ill-advised members of the human race are willing to part with substantial amounts of hard-earned cash in order to watch these aquatic cavortings. You pays your money, you takes your choice—and Amen! to that, too.
No, the cause of my choler is not that people want to amuse themselves in such eccentric ways. Rather, it’s the apparently unshakeable belief that because they think it’s the best thing that’s happened since God (or was it Mother’s Pride?) verily clove the two-pound loaf into several and brought forth Sliced Bread, that I must share their opinion. So this will no doubt come as a shock to them: I don’t.
And yet I cannot turn on the TV and watch the BBC’s World Service for more than five minutes (a practice which, as you may imagine, has become rather less frequent of late) without being addressed as ‘one of the faithful’, whose sole interest in life is to know where the Olympic torch is now (to within five miles) and that it hasn’t gone out… or that (heaven help us!) the government sincerely believes that spectators really are going to cycle back to their hotels in the chilly downpour of an average English summer evening after watching whatever it was they were watching (because public transport simply won’t be able to cope)… or that missiles are to be “strategically positioned” on the roofs of certain public buildings “for reasons of public safety”(what!?)
All that is more than enough in itself. But, in addition (so that Aural Injury may never lack for company while Intellectual Insult is around) we have The Jingle—that musical joke by which my eardrums are continually assailed. I’m given to believe that it’s title is London Calling, but I have lived long enough to know that nothing is certain in this uncertain world—and this is no place to engage in philosophical debate as to what the name of the song is called. It is performed by what a (probably apocryphal) judge once referred to as a ‘popular beat combo’. And, just as all things in the world are uncertain, so is that group’s enunciation of the words of this soul-stirring refrain. To put it bluntly, after being subjected to more than a hundred brain-bludgeoning repetitions, I still didn’t have a clue what the hell they were singing about.
I mentioned this to Hache… who promptly admitted that she hadn’t a clue either. So (purely in the cause of linguistics) we each produced a version of what we thought the words were. Here are both of them, presented side by side for the purposes of comparison:
| Hache: Be sure the light stops don't mean “turn to stone” You're shiny when I'm alone. And so I tell myself that I'll eat scones (They're cheesy when they're cold) 'Cos they're corny, corny, corny – Need some - corny, etc. | Peter: You're sure the lies got stroppy Turned to stone You ship* it when I'm alone And so I tell myself That I've been stolen And cheese-links when they're gauche... 'Cos they're corny, corny, corny Beef funk, corny etc... |
|---|
*I sincerely hope this is ‘ship’, because another alternative offers itself quite strongly.
If you’re sad enough to want to see the ‘real’ words (which, I have to admit, are sometimes funnier than our ersatz ones), then please click here.
Peter
My apologies for the “grocer’s apostrophe” in paragraph 5 of the ‘Corny!’ blog. Put it down to the joys of word processing.
Peter
Hmmm. Dunoo what to make of this one. One the one hand I LIKE the Olympics. Well, OK, I like some of the events (mainly the track & field). At least I THOUGHT I did, because, like you, I am sick to the back teeth of the over-the-top blanket publicity that started several months ago, and is utterly inescapable. I mean, I GET it – the Olympics are on in London this summer. I realised that some time ago – so, until they actually start, PLEASE SHUT UP ABOUT IT, BBC!
As for the ‘jingle’, I have no idea what it is. I must be mentally filtering so well that it isn’t even an ‘earworm’. I am aware of a 1980 song called ‘London Calling’ by ‘popular beat combo’ The Clash – and I rather like it. But those words (either yours or the ‘official’ version) don’t feature anywhere in that song, so that can’t be it. I would say I’ll listen more carefully the next time the BBC trailer comes on (i.e. anytime in the next seven minutes or so), but that would be rather counterproductive to my attempts to minimise pre-Olympic fatigue. Oh well, according to several C of E bishops, the current Biblical rainfall is due to God’s displeasure with our behaviour – so perhaps He’s utterly pissed off with the Gamesmania, too, and will wash the whole thing away in a fit of pique.
Now I dunno, Mike. Hache found the words after much web-trawling—tracked them down to a YouTube video which *is* the same one that the Beeb keeps pumping down the line via World Service (we watch for about an hour each evening, during which the d****d thing must be played more than half a dozen times). But perhaps only we poor ex-Pats get assailed by it… The link is:
Ah, OK. That’s a different ‘London Calling’ from the one I know. By one Ellie Goulding, apparently. Never seen it before (they’re not showing it here). We get this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ViLiXA0E70
I find the animations annoying, but I thought the music was perfectly OK to be honest – until I’d heard it for the 500th time. In a day.
…except that it seems to have been recorded through a plethora of cotton wool in a very congested phonebox (or perhaps the recording engineers think that the English language actually sounds like that? Answers on a postcard, please…)
I had no idea they’d changed the words! I was simply left seething that they’d appropriated a classic punk anti-establishment song. The paucity of thought in choosing a song simply because it has London Calling in the title. Then realising the words were about the end of the world then thinking ‘Oh Ho! We can’t have that, let’s change them.’ So in stead of picking some assanine bit of pop which we’ll all gratefully forget even as we hear it, they take a musical statement that carried power and meaning and shat all over it. The thick, glossy varnishing shit of corporate marketeers. It will be over soon.
Sadly, Russell, life is even nastier than you think. It appears that the version we get ‘over here’ (ie, as chucked incessantly at us by BBC World Service) is not the same one as either (a) the classic punk song, or (b) the one you get from the Beeb in the UK. If you look at my conversations with mike Mooney, you’ll be able to enjoy the rare experience of the one we have!
Yep. It’s not a re-wording Russ, it’s an entirely different song. For Peter’s benefit, this extract from the original may seem more apt:
The ice age is coming, the sun is zooming in
Engines stop running and the wheat is growing thin
A nuclear error, but I have no fear
London is drowning – and I live by the river…
Oh,, now I see (and hear). My anger fades.