Sunday 6 September 2015

Alice, The Shotgun Wedding, The Repentant Root-Rat, & The Shit-Boring Vet

My son's cooking dinner - nachos.  I'm drinking red wine.  My weekend has consisted of working, gardening and helping out a friend.  This help entailed a police officers - it's been busy.

BUT I'm not too busy to do a little research and thinking for those of you who don't want to listen to songs that have really annoying or shit-boring narratives.  Every now and then you hear a song that makes you want to scream at the singer, 'Nobody fucking CARES!!!'  Anyway, dear reader, here are a few for your not-so-listening-pleasure:

1. 'Living Next Door To Alice' by Smokie.  This song is one of those polarising ones that people appear to love or loathe.  Lemme give you a hint: I'm about to pay out on it.  Truly, it's a load of the most lachrymose twaddle ever put to vinyl - I'm old; I remember vinyl.  This bloke is bleating and whining about how this woman he's loved all his life is leaving the area.  She can't have been all that into him at all because she didn't tell him she was leaving, he got the news from Sally.  So he's moaning and groaning about having waited for his chance to tell her he liked her.  Okay, you might think, but get this: it's been twenty-four years!  Surely he could have made a move in that time.  I know shyness is crippling, but like I said: twenty-four years!  No sympathy from me.  This song is such overwrought bloat, it's become something of a parody in which people find themselves chanting, 'Alice?  Who the fuck is Alice?'  Come on, admit it.  You've all done this.  But all is not lost for the faint-hearted twerp who didn't win fair maiden.  Sally rings back, and says she's been waiting for twenty-four years.  You can do the maths.  The lovelorn loser need worry no more about missing his chance with Alice; Sally is more than willing to give him a root, but she will have to be prepared for the possibility he is going to sing out Alice's name at the crucial moment.

2. 'The River' by Bruce Springsteen.  Don't get me wrong, I like the Boss.  I've been listening to his wonderfully cynical 'Brilliant Disguise' today.  I love the ennui in his delivery, and the addressing of the falsities in the relationship. I have trouble keeping a straight face at times because I'm one of those idiots who thought he was singing, 'Is that you, baby, or just a brick in disguise' when I first heard it.  But like the song referred to in Point 1 above, 'The River' is just a great big whinge.  The tune is as bleak as an overcast and drizzly day in my home town, which is Muswellbrook - a coal town.  He got his girlfriend pregnant and had a rather clinical wedding ceremony at the town court house, and he's got no money because of the current economy.  This song makes me want to scream at him did he not wear a condom, or why didn't they have an abortion.

3.  'I've Never Been To Me' by Charlene.  Not enough can be written to describe how I loathe this song, and how I want to scream, 'Nobody fucking CARES!!!' when it's played.  I have written countless paragraphs about the atrocities contained in that song: the whining, the sickly spoken bridge, the fact she had sex with a priest.  What always gives me the good old shits is her moaning about having visited the Isle of Greece, because I'm pretty sure Greece is a peninsula.  If I had been spending my time sailing on a yacht, sipping champagne, and getting my brains banged out, I wouldn't be mewling and bleating about it.  Hell no, I'd be like, 'HAHAHAHAHA!  Fuck yas!', and flipping the bird.

4.  'Working Class Man' by Jimmy Barnes.  Another song that I have always loathed, every since I first heard it thirty years ago as a relatively fresh faced nineteen-year-old.  I'm now forty-nine, and the years have not tempered my detestation of this utter wankery.  Jimmy Barnes yowls and screeches, like a tortured cockatoo, about some shit-boring bloke of apparent sub-borderline intelligence, still harbouring a few issues about his tour of duty in 'Nam.  He's a 'simple man' with a 'heart of gold'.  You know what?  I. Don't. Fucking. CARE!!! It would be far more interesting to hear about a Machiavellian prick who manipulates all those around him in his own twisted chess game.  This bloke would not have a heart of gold, indeed he would have NO heart, but he would have a mind of malicious mischief and malevolence, as he screws over every potential investor, and just screws their wives.  He didn't go to 'Nam because he blackmailed the clerk in charge of Conscription so his numbers wouldn't be drawn (he threatened to tell everyone the clerk was a Communist, and smoked weed, and wore a girdle).  He has a shitload of money that he acquired through the hard work of others, spends it on high class call girls and cocaine, and sneers at the Salvos.  An unpleasant piece of work, I will grant you that, but still a shitload more interesting than the battler Jimmy Barnes is currently shrieking about.

Okay.  The red wine in my glass is getting low.  I bid you all adieu. 

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