Labels: 25th Floor
Review by: Captain Fidanza
What the fuck is it with pirates that seems to attract the most vacuous, execrable human beings on the planet ?
Under extreme duress, I attended a fancy dress party about five years ago which had been billed as having a “pirate-theme.” It was around the time of the second Pirates of the Caribbean film and for some reason, several dozen people in their late-twenties thought it might be a good idea to dress up and pretend to be pirates until the early hours of a sunday morning in July.
Needless to say I abstained from dressing up, but I was happy to drink their lager and throw my empty cans into their neighbours garden until (and beyond) the point at which a can thrown at almost any possible trajectory was met with the sound of another can as it landed. By about midnight, when most right-thinking people had taken off their eyepatches and started calling for Billie Jean to be put on, there was still some cunt prowling about the house apparently with the sole intention of saying “ahhhhhhh” to people in what he assumed was an approximation of a pirate’s voice. At midnight. We arrived about half nine and it was the first thing he said to me so god knows who he thought was still finding it funny nearly three hours later.
All of which circumlocution brings me nicely to this here CD. It’s called “Gay Pirates” you see, which is why I was talking about that pirate themed fancy dress party. But this song is not a comedy single about pirates which a band like Black Lace would have recorded if they hadn’t disbanded in 1987, oh no, it is a record which “seeks to challenge the ignorance of today’s society by illustrating the horrors of the past” and it attempts to do this by focusing on “breaking down the homophobic residue that still remains today.”
Pretty heavy stuff I’m sure you’ll agree and the manner in which the song “seeks to address prejudice by getting the listener involved with the subject matter on an almost subconscious level” is not only quite startling, it also represents another parallel with the career of much maligned eighties funsters, Black Lace.
It is only recently that I have discovered that the Black Lace song “Superman” which I used to dance to at discos when I was six years old, is actually a meticulously crafted investigation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s widely misinterpreted theories of the Ãbermensch. I’m sure there is not a reader amongst you who has not, at some time or other, clapped their hands, slept, waved their hands, hitched a ride, sneezed, gone for a walk, swum, gone skiing, sprayed, been a macho man, sounded their horn, rung a bell, been OK, kissed, combed their hair, waved their hands again and then jumped off a chair pretending to be Superman whilst going “wooooooooooooooooo.”
Further to this, I can’t imagine there are many of you, whom, whilst enjoying the many and varied commands of this superlative 1982 hit, did not stop to ruminate upon the Third Reich’s carefully selective misappropriation of Nietzche’s theories, done in a calculated attempt to validate their notions of the inherent racial superiority of the Germanic people. Can there really be an eight year old in the land who, whilst clapping their hands, looking really good and getting ready to do it one more time, has not considered the idea that if all beings have thus far created something in advance of themselves then unless the strongest of humanity continues to move forward at the expense of the weak, then we will all naturally be reduced to the level of those we consider the foulest and most bestial amongst our number and that it follows from this that the Ãbermensch defines both the meaning and the nature of the earth itself. Man is a rope, tied between beast and the Ãbermensch, a rope which hangs constantly over the abyss and the defining notion of our very existence should forever be, that man is a bridge and not an end.
What do you mean Black Lace haven’t disbanded ? You what ? They had an album out last year ? You’re having a fucking laugh mate.