Last night I was struck by a thought that I'm told is common among young men playing beer pong on the second floor of bars surrounded by fratty Wall Street dudes and their bored-looking dates: HOLY SHIT, THIS SONG SOUNDS A TON LIKE THE "MAGIC SCHOOL BUS" THEME.
The song cued up on the place's inoffensive bar-rock playlist was Sheryl Crow's "Steve McQueen." The verse sections sound remarkably similar. Here, tell me I'm wrong.
From Sheryl's official site: "C'Mon C'Mon was a difficult record for me to make," she says. "I was turning 40, music was changing, it was all Britney and Christina and lots of beats, and I was really struggling with how to stay relevant." Apparently her solution was to pander to the Britney-Christina audience was to CRIB SHAMELESSLY FROM FONDLY REMEMBERED EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMMING.
And I'm not the only one brave enough to brand Mrs. Crow a melody-plagirist: Over on YouTube, in the most recent comment on the "Steve McQueen" video, bman041 writes: "I really like this song, but doesn't sound alot like the magic school bus"
bman041 was clearly so disgusted that Cheryl would stoop this low that he lost the ability to punctuate questions and place the word "it" where it makes the difference in what his sentence means. I'm barely able to string these words together myself, so deeply do I treasure the TV shows we sometimes got to watch in science class instead of doing work ("Forensic Files" holds a similar place in my heart. Fortunately, to my knowledge, no one has yet ripped off its moody, wordless theme song, though forensic-dance outfit Groove Scene Investigators sampled it for their 2005 cult hit "Inadmissable As Evidence In The Court Of Love.")
The treachery may not stop there. An anonymous source has suggested Crow's 1996 hit "If It Makes You Happy" is merely the Gummi Bears theme played backwards, and there are whispers among industry insiders that Disney gave her free reign to pillage their stash of cartoon theme music and Frankenstein a number of tracks into what eventually became "Real Gone," her song on the "Cars" soundtrack.
Who cares? Every red-blooded American who doesn't like having a precious piece of their 90's nostalgia ravaged by a middling singer-songwriter who, by all rights, should be relegated to being a not-so-precious piece of said nostalgia: That's fucking who.
Posted by DC at June 14, 2006 12:02 AM