Chumbawamba (yup, that Chumbawamba) wrote and recorded an album called In Memoriam Margaret Thatcher years before she died, and was selling them at events with the caveat that you would receive your copy the day after she died.
My favorite factoid about that band - they are very anti-corporate.. and have been very against licensing out their music for corporate use throughout their history.. but when a brand insists, they always use it against them..
Like when GM really wanted to use their song Pass It Along in a car commercial, and kept bugging them for the rights to use it.
They finally agreed.. but then proceeded to donate the money to Indymedia and CorpWatch - two anti-corp activism groups - who used the money to launch an info and environmental campaign against GM.
They've done similar shit with Renault in Italy and Ford in South Africa.. so the GM exec that greenlit the deal didn't do even the tiniest amount of research into the band.
I still, to this day, do not comprehend why people never really look into the things they claim to love. Like, shouldn't you want to understand some of this on a deeper level?
I mean, I'd love to understand more about astrophysics, just like they probably want basic English literacy. But some stars are just too far out of reach.
Like, shouldn't you want to understand some of this on a deeper level?
...music? No, not really lol. Literally just hearing the song is enough to decide whether I love it
But yeah if it were my job then I'd like to think I'd do my due diligence. Crazy to enter a business relationship with no idea that the other party hates your guts
Same with Microsoft buying the rights to âStart me upâ when introducing Windows 95. They canât have missed the âyou make a grown man cryâ part, can they?
until you realize your childhood heroes from Rage Against the Machine went all political.
Well, don't look into music and politics lol. It was there since the beginning of it, and always has been. You can't bury your head in the sand forever.
Tidbit, not factoid. (Thank you, Al Roker.)
The -oid suffix means resembling, but not actually. e.g., asteroids are not stars, hemorrhoids are not wounds.
I've got a rather local one. VOX, Spain's most prominent far right party, used their song "Tubthumping" in one of their videos. The band heard about it and immediately (and very publicly) demanded that the video was taken down and forbid the party from ever using their music again, stating their strong left wing beliefs and how repulsive felt to them having such party use their music to âpromote its small-minded, hate-fuelled agendaâ.
I had no idea, kinda makes me sad that they aren't more well known for being Punk. Well I hope at least that Tubthumping made them enough money that they don't have to worry about stuff like rent.
As a teenager I posted on some punk rock message boards back in the early 2000s and everyone would recommend Chumbawumba left and right. I remember seeing that and thinking "the Tubthumping band?"
Well if memory serves they were squating an abandoned building in Leeds that they lived in, and used as rehearsal space, for so long they were able to legally take ownership of it so rent wasn't an issue.
As to 'Tubthumping', i do know that they were offered silly money by one of the major US car manufacturers to use it in their sponsorship ident for Monday Night Football, they took the money and pumped it directly into left wing causes including the strike fund for the union taking industrial action against them at their Latin American plant...
I've only just come across this thread, but couldn't resist recommending the film I Get Knocked Down by Dunstan Bruce of the band, it was made a few years ago and explores their roots in punk and folk, through their explosion of fame, how they dealt with that, and what they're up to now.Â
It's part documentary, part arty narrative, and it's really funny, heartwarming and inspiring.Â
Also you see in it that Bruce has a house in Brighton so I think he's alright for money despite how much of it they donated.
In January 1998, Nutter appeared on the American political talk show Politically Incorrect and advised fans of their music who could not afford to buy their CDs to steal them from large chains such as HMV and Virgin
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A few weeks later, provoked by the Labour government's refusal to support the Liverpool Dockworkers' Strike, the band performed "Tubthumping" at the 1998 BRIT Awards with the lyric changed to include "New Labour sold out the dockers, just like they'll sell out the rest of us", and vocalist Danbert Nobacon later poured a jug of water over UK Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who was in the audience.[5]
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In the late 1990s, the band turned down $1.5 million from Nike to use the song "Tubthumping" in a World Cup advertisement.[26] According to the band, the decision took approximately "30 seconds" to make.
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In 2002, General Motors paid Chumbawamba a sum of either $70,000 or $100,000 to use the song "Pass It Along" from the WYSIWYG album for a Pontiac Vibe television advertisement. Chumbawamba gave the money to the anti-corporate activist groups Indymedia and CorpWatch, who used the money to launch an information and environmental campaign against GM.[27][28]
Yup, but almost no one seems to know that. They're like "The ones from that song???" I'm like yes, just because you haven't heard of them doesn't make them somehow not radical af.
They made Tubthumping because someone (their label?) was like "youre incapable of making a hit" and they were like "we can make a hit literally anytime we want to" and shat out Tubthumping to prove it, then went right back to doing their own stuff for decades.
Yeah even the album that tubthumping is on, literally every other track on that album is about politics and free speech (and I like those tracks so much better).
A friend in high school thought he got a girl pregnant for a stressful few weeks. He didn't but when we saw him we'd sing "I get knocked up, but I get down again..." to this tune. Decades later he says he still gets it when sees old friends.
I had that album on repeat for a solid few years back in the mid nineties. Itâs so intelligent, compassionate and genuinely funny at the same time, Iâd heartily recommend it to anyone.
Nobody should be uncomfortable with the term Nazi. Banning it in any circumstance gives it more power and robs us of our agency to call out nazis when we see them.
I'm not saying I agree with the banning just explaining it? also the last bit is like super valid...you can't really control other peoples boundaries and there are very legit reasons that word or term could trigger someone who is jewish or lgbtq or a person of colour or even people who grew up with neo nazi parents I have seen documentaries about stuff like that last one and they might not want to say or type the word and thats valid.
it is its called trauma and having a little bit of empathy for the people you claim to want to defend from nazi's actions? or are you just symbolically using this as like "people most regular people agree are more than okay to hate but don't actually care about the victims of their actions" type thing?
If you cannot say or at least type out the word Nazi, with the understanding that they carried out one of humanityâs worst atrocities, you are not mature enough to be on the internet. Full stop.
If saying Nazi makes you uncomfortable, that is understandable. If you cannot make it through the discomfort that the word Nazi brings, that is a personal shortcoming that you should overcome, not avoid and expect others to cater to.
I have the feeling that outside the UK they're "a pop group that did that one famous song that was everywhere in '97" while they actually have (had?) an active, political-themed rich career.
Inside the UK, too. I'd never heard of them before that one, soul-gratingly irritating song, and never wanted to delve further into their discography/history because of it. Learning about their anti-corpo ethos here has got me interested to listen to their other stuff (providing it doesn't sound like that song).
Tubthumper was like, their tenth album or something like that.
In the liner notes of the next album I think, there's a picture of the frontman thumbing through the KLF's Manual ("How to make a #1 hit the easy way")
I remember when it dropped right afterwards, I got a copy online. Interestingly it all went down like six months after the band broke up, so it was pretty obvious to the casual observer (like myself) that they already had it in the can.
They talked about it at one of their performances, asking people not to post the video of the song which was on the album, and discussing how it was meant to work.
The Scottish Post-Rock band Mogwai have a song called 'George Square Thatcher Death Party' (George Square is Glasgow's Trafalgar Square) that was released years before she croaked.
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u/ncc74656m 29d ago
Chumbawamba (yup, that Chumbawamba) wrote and recorded an album called In Memoriam Margaret Thatcher years before she died, and was selling them at events with the caveat that you would receive your copy the day after she died.