Wednesday, July 15, 2015
Generic localism, buffalaxed.
A nice contrast to my heartfelt love for a specific actual neighborhood as expressed in previous item.
KREM-TV, formerly part of the Belo empire, has been subsumed in a segment of Gannett called Tegna. Tegna looks suspiciously like a partial anagram of Gannett. At any rate, their webcasts have changed slightly, with two Localist Songs substituting for unbought ad intervals. Tegna seems to be proud of these Localist Songs.
Shit. These songs are generic, applying equally to anyplace or noplace. They're like Miss America Contestants who pick their "native" city for strategic benefit without ever seeing the "native" city.
I've never been able to parse rock-n-roll into anything resembling English, so I just had to buffalax one of the Localist Songs.
Let's go a big world,
And all eleven are like the doctors,
That put your head onto the big screen,
And never cottage cheese always ice cream.
Dreeeeeeam? Hah!
Oh I can't take a place and give me a head,
It gives the last one back and gets out of bed,
Dibadee dib and dibadee dib,
Set it out can't get enough,
His right evil make it Joe!
Joe! Joe! Joe!
This is a ho, oo oo oo oo.
This is a place, oo oo oo oo.
We think it out oo oo oo oo,
Sing it out, take it out, cheese it out...
Yeah? Hah! This is a ho!
I think Joe must be the guy who brought the ice cream.
More seriously, I should be happy they didn't try to personalize the songs. Over the decades songwriters have tried to personalize (civicize?) songs, mainly for phonetic purposes like Kokomo or Kalamazoo. None of these songs are really about the named city; they include none of the local landmarks or characteristics. Only NYC has truly local songs because songwriters never leave NYC.
Later addendum: A local newspaper columnist turned up this song about Spokane. Written to connect with Nixon's Expo 74. Singer Bob Bellows was clearly trying to do the Tom Jones sexy lounge lizard thing, but completely failed. Since Tom Jones was already a complete failure, this is quite an achievement. Failed fail. The tuning is multiply wrong in a way that literally made me dizzy. Like driving on a rough road with a mix of bias and radial tires.
¶ 5:24 PM 
