Attached Is The Review What Got Me Shitcanned
“Dirty Dan is Looking At You” entered the UK charts at #8; within two weeks, it was up to #1. It was D*SH’s first big hit.
Complete shit, of course. Reheated Kinks by someone who hasn’t heard the Kinks, but did hear that Damon Albarn drew from them to write his great stabs at countryside English pop. Ray Davies isn’t dead, but that didn’t stop D*SH from making a crude voodoo zombie out of the poor man, and then making that shambling horror struggle through the steps from “Stepping Time”.
And that opening…that fucking opening. All broken oomp-pah brass and canned English guitar noodling. You want to punch it even before Winfist starts mewling “Dirty Dan! / Peeks in win-dows! / Sees the things / You wish he oughtn’t see”.
What Dan sees is meant to be horrifying. But if it is (and it so fucking isn’t) it’s the schoolboy horror that comes from thinking the mad old woman down the street eats kids, or that the Chinese family is to blame for missing dogs in the neighborhood.
(Whereas a proper adult realizes that the mad woman is only 30, and quite exotic, and that the Wong family are absolutely lovely.)
Like a deeply retarded version of Pulp’s “I Spy”, it is the absolute worst kind of observational song; one written by someone who only sees the neighbors through cracks in the shades and thinks that’s a panorama.
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