Wednesday 8 October 2008

What we all need is a nice big hug



As the evidence of a recession piles up, I have on more than one occasion gone to my CD collection and picked out this song from the mid-1980s.

The song particularly reminds me of my father who lost his job in an earlier recession and had great difficulty finding another one.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

As long as you are being ironic and sarcastic, I suppose that soft ballad is OK... but I'd not want anyone in the FSA, for example, to assume they'd get off with a hug from me.

How about this alternative soundtrack... it's a little more up-to-date... and a little more aggressive... (Parental advisory.)

Economic Growth & Credit Expansion
(Papa Roach - "Never Enough")

Credit Crisis
(Disturbed - "Down with the sickness")

Capitulation
(Bent - "I can't believe it's over")

Anonymous said...

Asteve, I will check out your suggestions, but as a general rule, I don't like anything rude or lewd.

Alice

Anonymous said...

:-) Stick to the "Bent" track then... the previous two, however, I think, have remarkably apt lyrics... and there's a temporal progression from - say 2002 to 2010 in the context of British economics... which you'll miss if you flip to the last chapter.

To my ear the first two are neither rude nor lewd, but they are profane and angry. I've recently been reading Stephen Pinker's book "The stuff of thought" - with a great chapter on swearing... he argues that words that are banned on television because they breech taboos in order to show anger or outrage... and that, in a modern context, the origin is rarely relevant to the speaker.

I found this rather amusing - as Pinker includes an etymology of various profanities - including "Sucker" (which I'd never previously considered) and the next thing I heard was that G W Bush had said of the US Bailout: "This sucker is going down" - which rather highlighted for me the importance of context.

Anonymous said...

Ah!!!! Kate Bush