In the New York Times this week, Mark Oppenheimer charts the rise of the novelty song, from “Weird Al” Yankovic to Lonely Island’s “Motherlover.” While “Weird Al” Yankovic’s generation is described as hangers on, its parodies just a digest of the original success story, Oppenheimer notes that the novelty artists of today have joked their way into regular pop listeners affections on their own merits. “Motherlover” is not a novelty song, but “more like a national anthem,” he suggests.
This may be debatable, but for a brief moment before Christmas 2010, when it looked as if Ireland’s faux hip-hop answer to (hmmm…) Die Antwoord would knock the manufactured X-Factor hit from the top spot, this anarchic white trash piss-taking was the talk of the Irish nation. The piss-takers were called The Rubberbandits; they wore supermarket shopping bags instead of balaclavas, imitated hip-hop posturing, and basically acted as if they couldn’t give a rat’s arse about anything or anyone. The hit was “Horse Outside,” a song about a guy who turns up to a wedding and lands the hottest bridesmaid by convincing her that she’ll have more glory leaving with him on his horse than going with the other suitors in their pimped up cars.
The refrain, “Fuck your Honda Civic, I’ve a horse outside” was provocative. After Ireland’s recent IMF bailout, it seemed symbolically defiant, as if Ireland was about to ride away into the sunset, not in a Honda Civic (the Irish boy racer’s vehicle of choice) but on a plain old horse, like the old days. To Irish eyes, it appeared as if the quaintness and buffoonery of this image was deliberately being ridiculed. It displayed a risky level of self-deprecation that has always been an Irish comic speciality; that is in fact a covert test of the audience’s intelligence. By way of example: Ireland’s popular comedy TV sitcom of the 1990s, Father Ted, mocked eccentric Irish Catholicism and was lapped up by British viewers. While many got the double irony, many others didn’t, laughing along anyway to the tune of an unconscious prejudice against their neighbors. As the Rubberbandits recently remarked, that was half the point.
The Rubberbandits have openly acknowledged their use of self-deprecation as a comic weapon. One of their songs is a parody of armchair patriotism, with all the fiddles and drums of a typical Irish Republican Army song but with completely insane lyrics, for example a litany of celebrities who are fictitiously named as being in the IRA: “Winona Ryder: He’s in the Ra.” (We knew Winona Ryder was a shoplifter, but a member of a terrorist organization, not to mention a “He”? Now that’s stumping.) How The Rubberbandits improbably got from A to B, and whether they were driving responsibly on their way there, was the subject of a debate on Irish radio, where the lead member of The Rubberbandits came on air in rapscallion character and explained to an irate, self-righteous caller the concept of the unreliable narrator, not to mention baldly telling him that he needs to look up the word ‘irony’ in the dictionary.
After Michael Lewis’s recent article on Ireland’s embarrassing financial fuckup, the International community questioned why Irish people didn’t protest against the mismanagement of their economy. What this analysis missed was moments like the aforementioned, when the Irish used foul language and outrageous parody to satirize what their communities had become. The scene The Rubberbandits parodied was the Irish gangland world, which modeled its attitude on misogynistic American hip-hop culture, but could never help being let down by crappy, poorly planned towns, and unglamorous domestic ‘situations’ (i.e. living at home with Mammy).
The flipside of The Rubberbandit’s extreme profanity (for instance, a horribly crude and un-PC song about a fat girlfriend) was quite simply the past, bland few years of Irish culture, all milk-white hands and economic treachery. Even U2, who once represented Ireland’s music scene in a positive light, had transformed into smug, uncrowned princes of Ireland’s capital city, Dublin, with plans to build a giant tower named after them, which needless to say were shelved after the property crash. U2 represented an 80s Irish music scene whose fire had gone out, but their replacements were even worse: manufactured nonenties. First came The Corrs, who were a family of pretty ‘cailíns’ and one quiet bestubbled guy. At least genetics held this bunch together, plus a few decent melodies. Then, in the middle years of the boom, Westlife were conjured from the stable of Irish pop svengali Louis Walsh. There’s another essay in here about how Westlife’s name and image could be seen as a visual and musical representation of the failed community of West Dublin, a badly planned suburb that now languishes in a dirty soap bubble of half-built hotels and shopping centres. One of Westlife’s members even married the Taoiseach’s (Prime Minister) daughter, which gives you an idea of the utterly bland, officially sanctioned nature of the culture they represented.
The weirdest thing though was how profanity was conveniently removed from all Irish musical exports during the boom. Irish people use swear words like punctuation, and yet the musical products of the Celtic Tiger were bleached as white as snow. To those who actually cared, it was as if the hypocrisy of a corrupt, complacent society was being expressed in perfect synchrony by its culture. To those who didn’t, conservative musical culture was just another reassuring arm of the establishment that kept ‘us’ in overpriced houses and smart clothes.
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This week Ireland will elect a new government. The ruling party responsible for the economic disaster will be expelled and likely replaced with its twin: an equally bland conservative party that steps in as the ‘alternative’ every time the other crowd screws up (sound familiar?). Political and social change will be slow, not helped by the fact that Ireland is one of the few countries in the world that excludes its Diaspora from voting. Anyone who is seeking a literal explanation for the sense of disenfranchisement that is still found in Irish literature and art can look no further than this.
But the profanity has been unleashed. Perhaps the reason Irish people don’t stage massive protests is because the verbal invective they use against shamed authority figures is amongst the most vicious in the world. In medieval Ireland, there was legal provision for protecting oneself against a curse issued by a poet. The poet allegedly stood in a public place and let rip with the most evil, foul insults that could be mustered. Before he did this, the victim — often a reviled public figure — would have several chances to appease the poet before he began his assault. After that, he was basically screwed and could expect to die within a few days of the shame.
In more recent times, now that the corruption and mismanagement has been brought to light, the profane protesters have also come out in force. Instead of a mass political movement, though, the new effing and blinding has coalesced into an Irish arts and cultural scene that is exuberant, shabby, and modern, with off-rythms and undercurrents of productivity; more comic, more loose, and more creative than previous generations, who were for the most part represented by solemn novelists and bland pop stars. If anyone is looking for an undercurrent of rebellion in Ireland, it is within this scene that they will find it. In this new world, sweet grandmothers turn the air blue on public transport, and people casually swear as they tell stories of drunken adventures; this is the Dublin represented on a website that actually puts these outsider stories on a map of the city. In the music-making community, bands like Adebisi Shank have completely broken out of the folk-rock straitjacket that defined so many Irish acts to produce math-rock that sounds like it was played on instruments welded from materials salvaged from a kid’s playground.
The ‘novelty’ song by its very nature always comes out of leftfield and is difficult to manufacture. So while a skit is not always a targeted political protest, it is definitely a sign that cultural activity is booming on the ground, rather than being cynically concocted in the laboratories of power. When the dull, cold, rock (as represented by U2’s recent, shudder-making, ‘iconic’ efforts of steel and glass) is removed, its underside is often teeming with truly productive activity. In Ireland, until recently, creative communities have been a well-kept secret, with everyone running around above ground, pretending to be busy and important. Hopefully, now that the other side of the boom is conspicuously on view, actually living may become more of a priority than the ‘pretend-life’ that art mimics in the name of tragedy and comedy reenacts in the name of ridicule. Perhaps because parody is a bit like waking up with a hangover and realizing the full stupidity of the events of the night before, it will require a few more painkillers and cups of tea for Ireland to return to a better political reality. In the meantime, the drunken texts of the night before are pretty entertaining.
