| Monday, December 11, 2006 |
| High on a hill stood a lonely goatherd |
The Germans should have a word, in the tradition of schadenfreude, to connote something that is so bad it's totally awesome. Several months ago, a song called "My Humps" by the Black Eyed Peas somehow managed to capture the heart of the nation (or at least get under our skin), despite the fact that pretty much everyone agreed that it sucked. It somehow managed to be both awful and brilliant at the same time. I think the secret is that "My Humps" embraced its schlockiness; say what you will about Fergie, but she really sold that line about her "lovely lady lumps." It wound up being as gleefully trashy as a John Waters movie.
I wasn't sure anything could ever top "My Humps" until I saw Gwen Stefani perform "Wind it Up" on "Saturday Night Live." Now, I have had a grudging admiration for Gwen ever since I learned that she and I are almost the same age. Somehow, she's still considered a pop princess, and that makes me think that in some alternate universe, I could be hawking my own trendy clothing line and hanging out with an entourage of Harajuku Girls.
Gwen used to be the lead singer of a Southern California pop band called No Doubt until going solo a few years back; her new album, The Sweet Escape, features collaborations with a number of prominent hip-hop artists. "Wind It Up" was produced by the Neptunes and has an extremely minimalist accompaniment of taiko-style percussion and -- this is the key to the song's brilliance -- a sample from "The Lonely Goatherd." That's right, "Wind It Up" combines hip-hop with Rodgers & Hammerstein! When Stefani isn't yodeling the chorus from "Goatherd," she's spouting painfully vapid lyrics about her fab dance moves and clothes: "They like the way my pants compliment my shape." Not surprisingly, most critics hate it; USA Today called it "a tacky attempt at sexiness with an awkward integration of yodeling, rap and The Sound of Music." However, for some reason, we could literally not stop rewinding the TiVo and rewatching it. Not only was the song just bizarre, but the catsuit-clad Stefani herself was doing these weird aerobics-style moves in front of a troupe of cartwheeling dancers dressed in pinafores and Ugg boots. (The song's video, featuring Stefani in a mod habit, is equally odd.)
Someday, perhaps Gwen and the Peas' Fergie will collaborate on a song, and it will be so fabulously atrocious that it will cause a rift in the space-time continuum. |
posted by 125records @ 2:08 PM  |
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| 3 Comments: |
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Wow, thank you for posting the YouTbue link. I've been fascinating by the deranged awfulness/awesomeness (awesfulmeness?) of this song but still wasn't prepared for that video. Kudos to Gwen for keeping with the deranged Sound Of Music theme pretty much throughout -- my only regret is that there aren't any breakdancing Nazis.
By the way, when Jay-Z (Jay-Z!) sampled Annie (Annie!) for "Hard Knock Life", I knew that nothing was safe.
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Wow, thank you for posting the YouTbue link. I've been fascinating by the deranged awfulness/awesomeness (awesfulmeness?) of this song but still wasn't prepared for that video. Kudos to Gwen for keeping with the deranged Sound Of Music theme pretty much throughout -- my only regret is that there aren't any breakdancing Nazis.
By the way, when Jay-Z (Jay-Z!) sampled Annie (Annie!) for "Hard Knock Life", I knew that nothing was safe.