Winamp Wednesday: I Wanna Hear the Cannon!
Not the loon...
Winamp Wednesday is our continuing feature spotlighting all the MP3s I downloaded in the wild-west days of the early internet. B-Sides, live shows, off-air recordings, classics, and today's track...
Tom Green, “Lonely Swedish (The Bum Bum Song)”
Because sometimes free is the best price.
Yes, this song is the very definition of sophomoric. Guess it was a lucky break that I was mere weeks away from entering my sophomore year.
There’s really not that much to say about Tom Green’s antics twenty-five years on. These are easy jokes, the lowest rung on an antagonizing ladder. How much comedy can you wring out of invading someone’s personal space or falling down in front of them? What about if the comedian asks his parents about their sex life or tosses an animal carcass into their bedroom? Occasionally he would hit a comedy home run—I’ll admit to being a huge fan of “The Backwards Man” bit from Freddy Got Fingered, and “this isn’t Canadian Bacon, this is ham!” enters my brain quite often—but mostly Tom Green was simply a presence. He had zoomed down from Canada alongside Glenn Humplik to fill a vacant slot in 90s culture as comedy provocateur. The post-South Park cable landscape apparently needed a man who would commit (simulated) (I think) sex acts with a deer.
So why this song? How is this part of the collection? Simply put, it felt like an act of rebellion. “Lonely Swedish” predates nearly every other MP3 in this series, originally appearing in the summer of 1999. Green posted the song to his website for free and told fans to distribute it far and wide. I was just getting into the format, into the very idea of trading songs digitally and quickly. (A dalliance with WAV files the previous summer nearly filled up the family hard drive with William Shatner’s The Transformed Man, which no one was happy about.) Yes, I could go to mp3.com and get promo songs by regional favorites, stuff like Tapping the Vein and Ensimismada. There was even the occasional track offered from a video game soundtrack. But a major star throwing his new song onto the web for anyone and everyone?
It didn’t matter that I found his show gross and his whole persona sort of irritating. He had upended the natural order of things. I had to download the tune and become part of its cult just from the sheer chutzpah of it all. You’re dang right that I called in to Total Request Live to help push the song to number one on the countdown. We all knew the fix was in when MTV made Tom Green retire the song on air after only five days at the top. (They had pre-recorded the next week and didn’t want anyone to realize that the entire idea of TRL was a sham.) But for a second this felt like sticking it to the man at a time in my life where I could even conceive of what true man-sticking would even look like. My life had barely begun, and most of it had been as a child with no power of my own. This felt real. I could move the needle, even if it was for something dumb and unimportant.
Tom Green’s run in the spotlight wouldn’t last too much longer. He would have a devastating cancer diagnosis the next year, and Freddy Got Fingered is an infamous disaster that more than ended his chance at starring roles. In the years since I’ve fostered an appreciation for his bug-eyed appearances in mainstream films of this era, Road Trip and Charlie’s Angels and Stealing Harvard. You knew what you were getting when you hired Tom Green. You had to make sure it was the right tool for the right job.
As a 90s teen I couldn’t help but feel a little verklempt watching Tom Green and Drew Barrymore reunite on her talk show all these years later. All of us carry some kind of affection for people we haven’t seen in a long time. It’s more than just nostalgia or blind yearning that carries that along. There are some parts of us that remain bonded to our hearts forever.
This song does not qualify for anything that strong. It’s a curio, a trifling little novelty that served as a stepping stone to something bigger. But damned if I still don’t get amped up as it roars out of the bridge. For a free download twenty-four years ago that ain’t bad.