1967
FAT GIRL * THE HEPTONES * STUDIO ONE 2014 * UK
One of the big reggae hits, relatively speaking, in the UK of the period,
songs like this seem to come out of nowhere and sound like they have always been
around. Although Fat Girl, or Fatty Fatty as it was
known, could hardly be sung today as the ideological state apparatus has made
the subject of fat people, along with all sorts of other things, taboo. State
interference in the thoughts (expressed) by citizens of Britain have reached the
point where the British police stopped Beenie Man, a Jamaican recording artist,
at Heathrow Airport and questioned him on the homophobic contents of some of his
songs; his performances in the capitol were cancelled as a result of the
enquiry. Although some of Beenie Man's (real name Anthony Davis) lyrics are
hateful and ridiculous in the extreme it is a dangerous precedent to set when
censure is the norm in, what has been traditional seen as, Pop culture.
A decade later John Holt cut, on the same rhythm, a remake of the song as A (sic) Need A Vegie Tonight! (see below) A direct contrast in both terms of physical condition - you rarely find a fat vegetarian - and censorship - vegetarianism is (for now at least) a perfectly acceptable (goodplus) conceptword with the thought control police.
A NEED A VEGIE TONIGHT * JOHN HOLT * JACKPOT * JA
See also: