We're going to be awash in Euro-crap by the end of the football offseason. First we watched as Italy let Club Vandersexxx put on the opening ceremonies, which were only redeemed by the drilling whine of an F1 Ferrari doing donuts in the middle of the festivities. (Atlanta: now joined in redneckdom by Torino. Thanks for bailing us out, amici!) The ceremonies looked like a phantasm taken straight from our most feverish Nyquil-addled dreams, especially when the men in red body suits began to rollerblade around the stadium with flame shooting from their helmets.
Offseason nightmares: a cascade of Euro-crap.
The most reprehensible facet of the ceremonies dribbled from stadium speakers like watery shit from a goat's ass: the intolerable Euro-circus techno music accompanying every flourish of the show. Vangelis worked in '81; now it's a plague on the ears that rages through Europe and stages its most virulent forms at prominent sporting events.
Nowhere will the be more apparent than at the upcoming World Cup. (We swear there's a college football connection...keep going!)
The organizers of the World Cup feel forever obligated to assign a song to the World Cup--as if an epic clash of nations on the field of sport needed any more of a soundtrack than the puking screams of billions of bloodthirsty, half-mad soccer fans. To be fair, the songs have been good--New Order's "World in Motion" was decent, and at least Ricky Martin's "Cup of Life" could be sung by a hundred thousand people at a time--and have also been terrible, as in the Spice Girls and the Lightning Seeds doing something called "Top of the World" that we swear contains the brown note somewhere in the second verse. We'd link it here, but your laundrymat would hate us forever.
This will deteriorate with the knighting of an Italian band "Il Divo" as the architects of this World Cup's theme song. We know, you just read their name, and already you can feel the suck radiating from them. We're not done. Check:
None of this means anything though when you learn Il Divo have taken opera into the mainstream on a global scale.
Our point is that this can be done correctly, as in Fat Les' "Vindaloo," a hilarious tribute to English soccer thuggery put together by a cast of characters including the band Blur. (For god's sake, please watch that video to get an idea of where our culture's mania for drinking and sport came from.) Or you can fuck it up and give it to an Italian rock/opera band.
Il Divo: sucks on sight.
And given the dearth of things to actually talk about...who would do the official song of college football? This may seem like an irrelevant issue, but recall how horrified most college bloggerati were when Phyllis Diller and the other guy who constitute Big and Rich rolled out on the Gameday promos with "We're coming...and we're shit-tayyyy!!!" Never seemed right, right? Especially whenever they started talking about needing some ying in their ying yang, since we imagine the junkie-looking one's ying yang probably resembled a diseased piece of beef jerky?
QEDMF.
Our nominees for those who could do a suitable national anthem of college football would be:
1. AC/DC. Not American, but Australian, which can sometimes be more American than actually being from the U.S.A. Thumping, brainless, roaring music designed to be howled (not sung) by upwards of fifty-thousand people at once. Bonus: their songs tend to have fifth-grade level sexual innuendo, which would jibe well with the existing sexual overtones of football lingo and prevailing sense of humor in the fanbase.
2. Merle Haggard. Just has to get up there and grumble for two minutes, which would still be cooler than anything Big and Rich would put together. Extra points awarded if Haggard grunts something about immigrants, fat cats, or city-slickers drinkin' lattes and ruinin' his tailgatin'.
3. Li'l Jon. Understands the importance of music for the masses and its use of simple, loud expressions. Might also utilize the phrase "skeet skeet skeet," which we'd kill to see worked into a South Carolina Gamecocks cheer.
4. Andew W.K. The rawker of all rawk, Andrew WK would likely turn in a power chord-laden epic whose lyrics read as follows:
GO GO GO GO!
KILL KILL KILL KILL!
SCORE SCORE SCORE SCORE!
DIE DIE DIE DIE!
This being an exact replica of our inner monologue during Florida games, we think Andrew's up to the task.
The man for the job.
Your suggestions are welcome below.
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