How amazing that after over four decades of unhealthy obsession with pop music, you can still come across astounding oddball songs from your own lifetime and your own country that you never heard before!
Another version
This though is my favorite - the one I encountered first - while wading masochistically through an absolutely atrocious, nearly completely barren episode of Top of the Pops from 1976, the unchallenged nadiral year of British pop... at least until the 2000s.
The performance is at 27.32
Astonishing sounds the guitarist wrenches out of his instrument in "the solo"!
Followed by a performance by Twiggy. Singing country and western.
Nadiral it was.
Johnny Wakelin was a fellow from Brighton and amazingly "In Zaire" isn't even his first hit single about Muhammad Ali. Before the Rumble in the Jungle inspired "In Zaire", he had a Top 10 hit with "Black Superman (Muhammad Ali)".
He was initially almost monothematic, song after song about boxers and boxing.
This made me think about other songs about boxers and boxing, Or that take boxing as an allegorical framing device.
LL Cool J, "Mama Said Knock You Out" - the single greatest rapping performance of all time?
That one by Simon & Garfunkel.
Survivor, "Eye of the Tiger"
This garage rap oddity, uploaded to the commonweal by yours truly - specifically the second song, "K.O."
Didn't Guns N'Roses have a song about music journalists called "Get in the Ring"?
There's loads more, even just in rap.
Le Tigre's "TKO"
ReplyDelete