The world of fame so often seems like a big mystery to us mere mortals, and that’s why I appreciate it when celebrities cross-reference each other in music. These celebrity shout-outs make me feel like life is simplified into one big happy Facebook page, with famous people clicking each other's ‘Like’ buttons in an unsystematic and slapdash manner just like real people do!
So here are my Top Ten Shout-outs That Celebrities Make to Other Celebrities. And when I say Top Ten, I just mean it’s the ten that I can think of right now. Please add your own.
10. Vincent Gallo—I Wrote This Song for the Girl Paris Hilton
How Vincent Gallo feels now about writing
this song for Paris Hilton in 2001 we’ll never know,
unless we pay $50,000 for the privilege of having sex with him and ask his opinion about it at some point during the proceedings. That might be a bit awkward, though, not to mention a waste of money. (If I pay a gigolo that much to have sex with me, I want him to be fully focused.)
It was written three years before Hilton's 'One Night in Paris' sex video came out, and we can only presume that back then she was a beautiful and worthy person to write a beautiful and haunting instrumental about. I really want to believe that’s the case, because otherwise I’ll have to admit to the other painful possibility that Vincent Gallo is actually a total dick, which would really break my heart and make me question what exactly I've been saving up for all these years.
9. Ke$ha—Tik Tok
I admit, I had no idea what was going on in the world of ‘popular
music’ until I started going to the gym, whereupon my normal listening
soundtrack of
Yentl suddenly received a shocking infusion of Pure Top
50 Gold Hitz.
Ke$ha's number one hit song opens up with her sitting in a bathtub after
what seems to be a typically outrageous and hair-tanglingly night out, whereupon she refers to 'feelin’ like P Diddy’. She then
rhymes ‘P Diddy’ with ‘city’, and follows it up later by rhyming ‘Mick
Jagger’ with ‘swagger’. When a celebrity shout-out is a
rhyming
celebrity shout-out, it's undeniably even more charming than the regular shout-out. Which brings me to:
8. New Radicals—You Get What You Give
Near the end of this buoyant one hit wonder, the singer Gregg Alexander goes on a Touerettes-like tirade, claiming that artists such as Hanson (remember Hanson?!) and Beck (remember Beck?!) and Marilyn Manson (remember Marilyn Manson?!) and Courtney Love (you remember Courtney Love) are all fakes and he’s going to kick their asses in. It's a rhyming rant that created some amount of controversy at the time.
Now you know how much I personally hate involving myself in celebrity-bashing; in fact, the sole purpose of this blog is to protect and defend the poor, defenceless creatures from such vicious attacks as Alexander's. But instead of focusing on that today, I'd instead like to accentuate the positive and highlight a comment from the clip’s YouTube
page which expresses exactly what I
know we're all thinking whenever we watch this clip:
“I don't know where this mall is but I wanna go there soon cuz it looks like everyone is having a blast!”
I'll say!
7. Ben Lee—Catch My Disease
This is the song (embedding disabled by request) where Ben Lee shouts out to Good Charlotte, The Sleepy Jackson and Beyonce. I speak for myself and my three former flatmates when I say that hearing it for the first time was perhaps the most cringeworthy moment any of us had ever experienced in our young lives. The horrified reaction as we watched it on
Rage one morning during the mid-two-thousands was: ‘
What disease? Does he mean
syphilis? DOES HE WANT US TO CATCH AN STD?’ It seemed like a reasonable question, but as soon as we left our small-minded and cynical sharehouse and walked out into the big, wide world, imagine our shock when we realised that hundreds—nay
thousands—of less arrogant and less judgmental people
loved this song! And that's why we’ve kept our opinions to ourselves ever since.
6. Sophie B Hawkins—Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover
When Sophie B Hawkins' ode to girl love came out, the lyrics of the bridge sent a clear message to me that lesbians like to dance around to The Rolling Stones. As I was a stubbornly heterosexual adolescent at the time who naturally didn’t want people thinking I would ever listen to such lezzo music as The Rolling Stones, I spent the rest of my adolescence listening to the Indigo Girls, kd lang and Ani DiFranco instead.
5. Miley Cyrus—Party in the USA
This is another song I discovered at the gym. In it, Cyrus gushes about the rejuvenatory qualities of listening to Jay-Z and Beyonce on the radio. This song reeks of short denim shorts, cowboy boots and in-your-face American patriotism. It’s also aggressively catchy and can make you want to die if you’re unfortunate enough to ever get it stuck in your head. But the clip also has a way of making you want to get your thighs looking like a sixteen year-old's, so I suppose it does have its uses when you're on the cross trainer.
4. Regina Spektor—On the Radio
I was living in a remote village in India for most of this year with only the soundtrack to
Yentl
and some old Ani DiFranco CDs to keep me company, so I had no idea that this Regina
Spektor song had become wildly popular with the kids of late. Anyway, I
think it’s quite a shining example of a Guns ‘n Roses shout-out, and I'd be
an absolute fool not to include it on this list.
3. Counting Crows—Mr Jones
I blame the Counting Crows’ repeated insistence that we all want to be Bob Dylan for encouraging all the men of my generation to want to be Bob Dylan. That's all I wanted to say.
2. Weezer —El Scorcho
My friend Ian suggested this one at the eleventh hour, and I can't believe I didn't think of it myself because that Green Day reference makes this song pretty much the cutest song I have ever heard since '
My Boy Lollipop'.
1. Wheatus—Teenage Dirtbag
I know you all think I just sit here listening to Barbra Streisand
all day, and you’re basically right, but I do occasionally mix it up with liberal doses of this adorable song by Wheatus. Such are the vagaries of one's music taste, which can be as unexpected and capricious as the weather.
Anyway, the Iron Maiden reference is so
relentless and so
crucial to this song's success that I had to choose it as my number one.
Special Mentions
Sonic Youth’s
'Malibu Gas Station' for its six-minute homage to Britney Spears.
LCD Soundsystem's '
Losing My Edge' which manages to mention pretty much everyone who's ever been alive.
And finally, not a song, but the inspiration for this misguided and weak blog theme here today: Natalie Portman’s
recent essay on
The Huffington Post where she explains how Jonathan Safran Foer’s book,
Eating Animals, changed her life and turned her into a vegan. You should go and read it immediately and then meet up with me later for some steamed rainbow chard to discuss.