Category Archives: Inappropriate Walk Up Music 2011

Inappropriate Walk Up Music 2011

Inappropriate Walk Up Music: “Lazy Mary”

For an intro to this series, click here. For the original series way back in 2009, click here.

Here’s an example of ballpark music that’s inappropriate even in the context in which it is used. “Lazy Mary,” a song made famous by professional stereotype Lou Monte (also responsible for “Dominic the Donkey”) is played right after “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” at CitiField. It is as old timey Italian as a mustachioed pizza chef, and most of the verses are actually sung in “the Eye-talian language” (Lou’s pronunciation, not mine). My guess as to why it became a staple at Shea is because of the large Italian population in Queens when the team was first established, particularly in nearby Corona, and therefore among the Mets’ fanbase.

“Lazy Mary” is a bouncy, goofy tarantella, the kind of song that inspires clapping along, so it makes sense musically as a stadium song. But the lyrics are kind of filthy. Here’s the section of the song that’s sung in English:

Lazy Mary you better get up
She answered back I am not able
Lazy Mary you better get up
We need the sheets for the table
Lazy Mary you smoke in bed
There’s only one man you should marry
My advice to you would be
Is to pay attention to me
You’d better marry a fireman
He’ll come and go, go and come…

Followed by some suggestions in Italian about what else this fireman will do (think hose metaphors). Shame on you, Lou Monte! There are kids at this ballpark!

Here’s the song in action during the 7th inning stretch at the last game ever played at Shea. If you look hard, you can see me in the mezzanine in this video.*

And while we’re on the subject of inappropriate, here’s a screen cap of the first video suggestion on the same page as that video. What the holy super-fuck, YouTube?!

* No you can’t.

Inappropriate Walk Up Music 2011

Inappropriate Walk Up Music: “Joy of Cola”

For an intro to this series, click here. For the original series way back in 2009, click here.

In the last two years, I’ve done two comprehensive retrospectives on Mets seasons: The 1999 Project and In the Year 2000. Both have required me to watch and listen to as many old games as I can get my hands on. While it can be uplifting to relive old vicarious glories, there is an odd danger in doing this: Getting old commercial jingles stuck in your head. The primary example is the old Pepsi tune “Joy of Cola.”

This is demonstrative of how quickly an ad campaign can explode, and how quickly it can recede. I would guess that this song has not been heard by anyone other than myself in a good eight years. But if you were alive in the late 1990s/early 2000s, this jingle was completely inescapable. I believe it was engineered in a secret CIA black ops lab where audiologists concoct deadly ear-worms. The song’s refrain–bup bup bup-bup baaaaah–has the perfect blend of unfuriatingly annoying and unshakable.

In TV spots, the jingle was accompanied by the adorable moppet Hallie Kate Eisenberg. She would often lip sync the jingle and dialogue recorded by famous folks like Aretha Franklin. Why was this so popular? That’s a very good question!

Like any corporation would, once Pepsi found out a formula for success–catchy song + cute little girl–they ran it into the ground. There was a version with the girl as a DJ, mouthing a monologue from Isaac Hayes. (Not creepy at all!) Another ad showed her in an Italian restaurant talking like Marlon Brando as The Godfather while dozens of unsavory stereotypes were celebrated.

For pure hateability, however, none was worse than the ad featuring KISS. I certainly hope someone was prosecuted for child abuse for putting this poor kid in dumb makeup and, even worse, making her stand near Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons. I’d say this is the worst thing KISS ever did, but their list of crimes is long and varied.

Inappropriate Walk Up Music 2011

Inappropriate Walk Up Music: “Overkill”

For an intro to this series, click here. For the original series way back in 2009, click here.

Not too long ago, I had the Men at Work song “Overkill” stuck in my head for a while. And when I say “a while,” I mean a month. There are two reasons why this was especially infuriating:

  1. It wasn’t intermittently stuck in my head, as songs often are. I heard this song in my mind almost constantly.
  2. I hadn’t actually heard this song in many, many years. So at first I didn’t even have the whole song stuck in my head. Just the one part where Colin Hay sings Day after day, it reappears, followed by the sax imitating the line.

My theory is, I’d heard this song at a friend’s house while watching MTV when I was young (I was cable-less as a kid), and it lay in wait ever since then, like a latent virus staying dormant for decades. What could have triggered it back to life? I can’t say. Does it even matter when the suffering sets in? Not that it’s a bad song, because it’s not, really. But anything is horrible if it’s inescapable.

It had been so long since I’d heard this song anywhere other than my brain that at first, I didn’t even know the song title or who sang it. I had to google random lines just find out this piece of vital information. Once I found out the responsible artists, I listened to it in full, hoping that would dislodge it from my synapses.

Big mistake. That just made it stronger and more virulent. It fed upon my brain matter and grew larger and larger, threatening to consume my very sanity.

And then one day, it left. I think it did as much damage as it could and crawled out of my ear as I slept to plague some other unsuspecting soul. I do not wish such a fate on anyone. So while this song is inappropriate as walk up music, it is particularly inappropriate to me, as I live in constant fear that it may return to haunt me again.

On a related note: Not long after my harrowing ordeal, Twitterer extraordinaire @trumpetcake–a master of the twitpic–posted a screencap of the YouTube comments for this video, with the caption “No one’s got any fucking sympathy anymore.”* As you can see, there’s a big drop-off in the content and tone from comment #1 to comment #2.

* Paraphrasing from memory. My efforts to find his original post proved pointless because searching for anything in Twitter older than yesterday is a baffling ordeal.