So, what's up with sports songs?

One particularly dreadful one featured a ragga bit going through all the Gunners names ("they got Paul Merson ann-a Lee Dixon" etc. etc.), and he would play it INCESSANTLY. Since he had the only PC and therefore the only games available, we endured. To add injury to injury, Arsenal striker Ian Wright then released a rap, called "Do The Wright Thing", which was inevitably of outrageously poor quality.

So, basically, sports songs are bought by sports fans when their team does well. They probably buy no other records and thank God for that.

But! There is a second tier of sports-song buyers. These are, in England at least, the people who buy El! compilations of lower division team football songs in order to get misty-eyed over their rough creativity, terrace spirit, downright stupidity, etc. These people trouble me less because they don't bother the charts with their hobbies.

So anyway, it was pretty torturous, having to listen to, "I like to move it, move it," so many times and all, but that's allright, cause my sister got the ok to play some Fantomas during class. Man, I'd love to be there for that.

Hm, good question.

T x

Still, the worst is the "classic" of the genre, US, "The Super Bowl Shuffle", performed by the entire cast of the Chicago Bears. Yes. Football players *rapping*. There's a reason why footballers play football instead of sing. This is why. It makes any of Adam Sandler's songs look fantastical.

Thinking of that, there's a whole other genre, related, of sports stars who release albums unrelated to sports, like Deion Sanders and Oscar De La Hoya and Shaquille O'Fuckingneil. Do they get contracts just because they are names? It can't be because they are talented. Deion supposedly had a video where he danced around in a Speedo. Very classy.

I haven't heard De La Hoya's record, so I can't really comment, but the Newsweek reviewer expressed some amount of shock that he could actually sing. That one might not be hopeless.

Deion, Shaq, and Mr. Iverson need to be kept far away from the studio.

Dex: Oscar can sing, I've heard him. It's just his music is the sort of muck that I hate out of a lot of male Spanish singers: all sentimental "hearty" ballads with "romantic" strings and crap like that. Give me Enrique any day.

The sole interest of the football song is as a mirror of whichever genre happens to be floating around at the time, its stylisations and exteriors flashing around the mainstream media waiting for appropriation (the Anfield Rap being the most staggeringly audacious and hilarious example of this). Unless, of course, you're Manchester United in 1994 and you appropriate Status Quo ...

Of course I would own an Exeter City compilation. I would likely find it funny, touching and embarrassing (and lots of other things), most probably all at once. People who listen to music which you think is bad aren't putting themselves through 'agonising torture', they're finding something in the music which they enjoy. I know that long- term fans of acts as unpalatable as U2, Momus and the Pixies have contributed to this thread, remarking on other peopleBs musical taste from inside the glassiest of glass houses. Bandying about insults about what musicBs good and whatBs bad is fun. Patronisingly second guessing other peopleBs imagined motives for listening remains pointless and crass.

I'm the (erstwhile) Momist, Tom's the Pixies fan, who's the U2 fan? Ally, perhaps?

Tim, I don't question that you'd enjoy an Exeter City compilation, but judging by your obvious shame at your past and your joy at having "won the victory over yourself", to get Orwellian for the moment, I'm surprised you haven't thrown in the towel with Chelsea yet ... :).

And before you curse me any more, Tim, I've added a link to your blog :).

I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about as regards my 'obvious shame' about my past. I assume that comment has the same status as you saying you know what sort of people I associate with (and for that matter, that El would not release football records): imagined.

My other comments were meant more generally, rather than aimed at you, Robin. This thread has been a good example of a wider habit for people hereabouts to be very sniffy about other people's tastes ("Football anthems that inexplicably top the charts" and such), as if the elevated position of specialist in Serious Music With Guitars gives one a deeper understanding of why others like what they like.

The question of why people like what they do is more or less bottomless and the way it's often dealt with on this forum and various associated sites / blogs is distressingly glib. It ranges from "inexplicable" (if the music is one which the NME would consider inferior to indie rock), to "they're just trying to look clever" (if the music would be covered in The Wire).

That's what I think

But I think your general suggestion that the posters here are devoted Serious Guitar Music snobs is plain wrong. Admittedly I'm typing here as a proud forum owner, but I think we do a better job of avoiding easy characterisations and NME-style prejudices than any other forum I've seen. The question of why people like the music they like may be bottomless, but it's also endlessly interesting, and if sometimes it takes a bit of silly generalisation to get that ball rolling, so be it.

You're actually quite right about people's sense of superiority over others, from the NME's bafflement - if not moral outrage - at why teenage girls, on the whole, don't buy indie rock, to the Wire's tendency to consider all music less avant-garde than its own choice as "stupid" or "backward". I don't like football songs, but rest assured that I don't consider myself intellectually and culturally "above" those who buy them (indeed, I've long thought Momus deeply misguided for his belief that he is "above" football fans in some way).

Cheers Tim!

I haven't seen any others. They must be dreadful.

>if sometimes it takes a bit of silly generalisation to get that ball >rolling, so be it.

I look forward to seeing any evidence of a rolling ball. Or perhaps the discussion of 'Scooby records' was it. So far, all I can remember seeing is belittling references to people 'only liking' music x 'because of y', rather than endlessly interesting cultural commentary.

And I know not all of the contributors here are one-horse guitar music obsessives, Tom, but the it's a rare contributor who doesn't count guitar-pop as a central musical interest (me included). Take a look down the topic list sometime, and see what dominates.

Other open forums are dreadful, generally, yes. Usenet offers boundless examples: see also Hissyfit and other sites' music boards. Mailing lists tend to be better: not quite sure why this should be.

I won't defend ILM against charges of being generally glib, because I like it that way, but I think occasionally some interesting ideas and back-and-forths have come out of it, and not neccessarily always about music. The Nirvana thread, your and Robin's countryside stuff, and the music taste turn-offs which I found glib AND interesting, in that it forced people to turn their prejudices about music on themselves a bit.

And my point wasn't that we're not guitar-centric but that we don't usually combine guitar-centricity with the kind of superiority and knee-jerk dismissal of other musics you seemed to detect. It strikes me that most of the disparagements are aimed at other guitar bands, indie-rockers etc. (The point of Classics Or Duds isn't praise, usually). That doesn't make them better, sure, but indie-kid self- loathing is different to indie-kid snobbery (and more entertaining, for my money).

Why do we talk about guitar music so much here? Because it's a forum, and the stuff contributors have in common gets more bandwidth on a forum than the stuff they don't.

And finally, it is interesting to speculate on why people like the musics they do. It's often wrong, but it's part of the social aspect of music and I wouldn't try to sever it from the other parts. Interesting things do come out of it - you see generalisations about football comps, it ires you, we get a few sentences out of you which we wouldn't otherwise have got. Bingo: worthwhile.

End of rant. Have a lovely fantastic day. Sports songs still suck, and their suckhood is what makes them endearing as far as any of my non-defensive friends and family have told me. When it was asked "Does anyone like these songs round here?", I expected a well reasoned response as to WHY you like them, not a rant by anyone about how "guitar centric" a bunch of admitted Daphne & Celeste* fans are.

* I am not a Daphne & Celeste fan, incidentally, I think they are vile and wicked. Give me Backstreet Boys or give me death.

Anyhow, the World Series is dead and gone, I have no interest in sports songs anymore, so if you got something to say to me about what I just said, feel free to email me.

PS NME blows great big chunks of goat cheese.

Anyway, Real Sounds' "Tornados And Dynamos" is a really brilliant football song, it being a 13 minute song about a game of football between the Tornados and the Dynamos. Cracking stuff.

- aye, esp. when tha TOON are playin':(

So there's this British guy named Johnny Wakelin, and his band is called the Kinshasa Band even though they're apparently not based in Zaire, and in 1975 he has a #21 pop hit in the States with a sort of semi-proto-rap/disco song called "Black Superman - Muhammad Ali." His only Top 100 hit in the States. But now I've been listening to a big pile of '70s K-Tel and Arcade LPs from the UK and Germany, and apparently he followed up the Ali hit with a 1976 single called "In Zaire," about Ali's Rumble in the Jungle with George Foreman. Had no idea he had other hits in Europe. Another compilation has one he did called "African Man," but that's not about boxing -- more about slave ships, it seems. So now you know.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ2_pVq1dsM

nb: missing parenthetical (for wayne gretsky)