Great Now I have "Blame Canada" In My Head from the South Park Movie. Here's a funny lil tidbit on it.
IT WAS CLEAR from the moment it was released that ``South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut'' was the best musical of the year -- not a particularly proud boast, since movie musicals are a dying art form.
But ``South Park'' had it all -- glitzy show tunes, sentimental love ballads, soppy paeans to small-town life, all of them pastiches of high-concept Disney cartoons and Andrew Lloyd Webber extravaganzas and every other monument to musical kitsch in the English language. Also, it had Saddam Hussein enjoying anal intercourse with Satan, plus every dirty word you know, including a few never uttered onscreen by Jack Nicholson or Harvey Keitel.
We figured that the academy would take the cowardly way out, as is its wont, and just not nominate any South Park ditty for best song. The movie was not exactly in the academy's wheelhouse -- it contained no literate examination of rich-people angst, no triumph of the human heart, no Meryl Streep.
But by golly, the voters proved us cynics wrong and nominated ``Blame Canada,'' which is not the best song in the movie but is one of the cleanest.
But not quite clean enough. Lili Zanuck, who is producing the telecast of the Academy Awards (where all the nominated songs are performed live) told ``South Park'' producers Trey Parker and Mark Shaiman that they would have to come up with a ``creative'' solution to the dirty words.
That would mean changing them to less offensive words and fiddling with the rhyme scheme to make it all fit. The producers responded: ``Bleep and be damned. '' Well, not in so many words, but that was pretty much the idea.
WHAT MAKES THE tale fabulously appealing is the way it recapitulates the wheels-within-wheels self- referential style that characterizes modern popular art, i. e. : ``Let's make a movie about two guys trying to make a movie and we'll call it ``Two Guys Trying to Make a Movie'' called ``Two Guys Trying to Make a Movie,'' which will be about two guys trying to make a movie. And we'll get Matthew Perry to play the real me and Brad Pitt to play the movie me. And I'll have a cameo as a mobster. ''
See: ``South Park'' is about censorship. It's about a movie with many dirty words, and a town that blames the movie with many dirty words for causing youth unrest, and because the movie within the movie is from Canada, everyone decides to ``Blame Canada'' and attack it with nuclear missiles.
So presumably, Lili Zanuck believes, or has to pretend that she believes, the saying of three dirty words on international television will cause a decline in public morality so severe that we will no longer have the option to blame Canada.
The three words in question are *****, fart and f--.
NOW, HERE WE can be very 21st century. I typed f--, but what you read was f--. That's because this newspaper, like every other daily newspaper in the United States that I know about, believes that printing f-- will be a violation of its contract with the reader.
Perhaps that's true. But I can make the word appear in the brains of every reader over 6 years old. I can type f--, and add ``rhymes with pluck'' and ``often called the F-word'' and ``vulgar expression for sexual intercourse. '' So now you know the word that appears in the song, but I did not type it, and thus the newspaper can maintain deniability.
There was a time in this country when people could actually go to jail for saying ``f--. '' Well, not ``f--,'' but what I typed -- unless you are by now automatically filling in the blanks, in which case the difference between f-- and f-- is nonexistent.
Zanuck does not want to bleep because it would call attention to the very censorship she is trying to exert. She wants a more genteel censorship, and she wields the scepter of establishment respectability. The guys who created Uncle F-- will probably not be impressed.
LOL!!!!!
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