Musical atrocities I heard today

First one, on the video wall as I was waiting for the lift to the cinema: Nitty's "Nasty Girl", which rips off the Archies' "Sugar Sugar". You take a cornball song and add bog-standard booty-obsessed lyrics, what do you expect?
Well honey (Whatcha got Mr. Mans)
I got a lot of money (I don't see no keys in my hands)
Could you be my nasty girl
And let me do that dirty dance witchu (If you want just give me money) (Lyrics)
Mad flow it ain't. When I was DJing there were always songs like this, tunes that were inescapably naff but that others inexplicably found catchy... not worth staking my credibility to play just because someone requested the tune.

This writeup has an inadvertently funny quote from Nitty:
The song is not about a woman being disrespected, but enjoying being free and letting loose. I want women to know that expressing their sexuality is not only normal, but also appealing. Being Nasty in essence is exploring your inner most private desires and forgetting what the other person on the dance floor thinks of you.
I'll grant that I love people who dance without caring that people are watching - personally, I feel there are too many stiff, self-conscious clubbers in Singapore - and I'll grant that double standards exist about expressions of sexuality between genders. But asking someone to be a "nasty girl" because you have a lot of money hardly strikes me as Third Wave feminism.

***

Second one, inside the Seiyu Department Store at Bugis Junction: Charlene's "I've Never Been To Me", an old bad-song classic. (The Seiyu name also always calls to mind Lionel Ritchie's "Say You, Say Me", another musical atrocity, but I'll save that for another time.) Charlene's song is so over the top that it probably qualifies more as camp than as a truly terrible song - I liked its use in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, even though I can't remember a damn thing about the rest of the movie. But the spoken-word part always cracks me up:
But you know what truth is?
It's that little baby you're holding, it's that man you fought with this morning
The same one you're going to make love with tonight
There's one thing that "little baby" and I probably have in common... wanting to barf uncontrollably.

Of course, I did watch Closer today, which was verbal jousting par excellence, delineating death by a thousand cutting words - so my forbearance for weak lyrical content might have been low.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Review closer!

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