In Praise Of Big Girl

Walks in to the room
Feels like a big balloon
I said, 'Hey girls you are beautiful'

Diet coke and a pizza please
Diet coke I'm on my knees
Screaming 'Big girl you are beautiful'.

If you're scratching the hair on your head, or in my 'Homer Simpson meets Charlie Brown' case, both hairs, you're saying 'huh'...what have I just read? Don't feel badly, my blog opening is obscure by design. Let me explain...

Have you ever had a song looping through your head and you fear that it's going to stick for life? Of course you have. I'm only into my 47th hour of a song right now. It was playing when I went to sleep at 1:08 a.m. this morning and it was still on at 5:37 a.m. when I got up.

Want to hear the troubling, yet fun tune that's Gazooing my brain at the moment? Warning: it's outrageous and potentially H1N1 contagious. Here it is, if you dare, with apologies for the few seconds of commercials that you're youtubered into watching before the video starts... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89GB7z_Ogt0

If you're anything like me (sorry about the ill fitting jeans and thinning hair), then you probably didn't catch all of the lyrics, or if you did, you botched half of them. I'm still trying to clarify the lyrics to The Flintstones theme song, and they're not that complex. Anyway, if you want to see the rest of the lyrics to Big Girl (You Are Beautiful), which I started at the top of this blog post, you can access them here. It's not poetry, like some songs I know, but they make me smile nevertheless.

I first heard this song a year or two ago but it didn't stick. Why it reached the tipping point two days ago is eluding me, but it's there and 'it ain't goin' away'. I even tried singing The Smurfs theme song, which historically has rid me of all unwanted melodies, but even it's not working. The funny thing about The Smurf remedy is that The Smurf song is infinitely more annoying than any song I've ever heard before, with a few exceptions (i.e. the entire Celine Dion catalogue, the worst of which made it onto Rolling Stone magazine's The Twenty Most Annoying Songs list).

If The Smurf song is no longer on the tip of your tongue, or perhaps never was and you want a nibble, click here and listen only to the first 11 seconds. The remaining 54 seconds are not worthy of your lovely lobes.

Ian, why were you listening to Big Girl in the first place?

Well, I was at Clam Harbour, Nova Scotia preparing to windsurf. My musically eclectic comrade suggested a little tunage to psyche us up for the big waves before we went out. This is not an uncommon practice. I remember one day in les Iles De La Madeleine, before a particularly epic session a few years ago, I was cranking The Offspring to get me all worked up into a lather. I hit the water with this pumping punk song coursing through my veins. It helped.

Not quite the case at Clam Harbour. Rather than pumping punk I was listening a collection of alternative pop/rock which, for one song, strayed into the realm of neo-psychedelia. Big Girl (You Are Beautiful), by Mika, was the last song we played before walking our gear down the long boardwalk to the beach. With an offshore wind there wasn't much blowing for the first two hundred feet of ocean. This is the area where the waves break, also known as the impact zone. You need wind to be (successful)...in this place I was standing in waist deep water with four foot waves breaking over my head, occasionally tearing my board and rig away from my hands. You'd expect that I'd have had words like 'oh shit' rolling off my tongue. Instead I had the following words...

You take your girl
And multiply her by four
Now a whole lot of woman
Needs a whole lot more.

Some things in life don't add up, like why some songs stick more than others. My apologies if Mika's song is now rattling in your head. I don't know what else to say, other than la la lalalala, sing a happy song, la la lalalalal Smurf the whole day long.