SubscribeThe news, (I heard via Spinneyhead) that James Blunt’s Goodbye My Lover is the number one choice for funerals is rather depressing. And not just because everything James Blunt does is rubbish. Few funerals are attended only by lovers current and ex-, unless the deceased was rather promiscuous, so how are others – children, work colleagues, say – supposed to relate? Blunt’s creepy enough without setting him in this unfortunate context.
And speaking of promiscuity, what are we supposed to make of Nelly Furtado’s bragging? Furtado has been the queen of nonsense lyric since singing; ‘I am like a bird / I don’t know where my home is’. Since when did birds start forgetting where they left their nests? And what about homing pigeons?
Promiscuous reminds me of a Greek holiday a few years ago when the bars were playing one of those Euro-pap songs that never make it over here. It repeated a line, ‘you sexy sexual’, that could only be written by someone for whom English is a second language. Similarly, on a ship from Cyprus to Egypt for an excursion the entertainment changed Elvis’s Hound Dog to ‘they said you were a high class’ (their emphasis). The point is that Furtado doesn’t seem to understand that promiscuous is not a complement and ‘But will you still respect me if you get it?’ is, by definition, not a line a promiscuous girl would use.
