The braying sheep on the TV screen make this boy shout, make this boy scream

If you watched the opening ceremonies of the London Olympics last night -- and if you listened carefully -- you might have heard a snippet of "Going Underground," the classic 1980 song by the British band The Jam. As with many (most? all?) of Paul Weller's songs, the lyrics have more than a slight political edge to them. For instance, there's this...

"I'm so happy and you're so kind
You want more money, of course I don't mind
To buy nuclear textbooks for atomic crimes.
And the public gets what the public wants,
But I want nothing this society's got.
I'm going underground (going underground)"

And then, a little later, there's this...

"What you see is what you get.
You've made your bed, you better lie in it.
You choose your leaders and place their trust
As their lies wash you down and their promises rust.
You'll see kidney machines replaced by rockets and guns."

I think you get the idea, but just in case, here's the vintage video of the band performing the song, complete with the sort of political image montage and stock footage of atomic tests you don't see much these days. Hey, it was the (very) early '80s after all...



So what's my point? I don't really have much of one, I suppose, except for having a timely excuse to share one of the truly great songs of the postpunk era. (Catchy as hell, isn't it?) I mean, of course, it's yet another example of a subversive song having its own meaning subvertied by being played in a rah-rah context, but that's nothing new. "Born in the U.S.A," a harrowing tale of a Vietnam vet struggling to cope somehow became a GOP rallying tune in the 1980s, and Iggy Pop's 1977 song "Lust for Life," which actually contains the lines "Here comes Johnny Yen again / with the liquor and drugs / and the flesh machine / He's gonna do another strip tease," was used to sell family-friendly cruise vacations for years. And I'm sure Iggy cashed each and every one of those checks. He's a Detroit boy. He knows how a product gets sold.

The man who revived "Lust for Life" in the 1990s was director Danny Boyle, who used it in the opening moments of his 1996 movie, "Trainspotting." Here's the first 26 seconds of that movie, featuring the tune playing in the background. Tell me it's not used perfectly, and then tell me if you were in the ad biz, you wouldn't immediately start thinking of ways to use it in a campaign. (There's one dirty word in Ewan McGregor's narration, so consider yourself warned, but don't be surprised -- it's a movie about Scottish heroin addicts, after all).



Boyle, of course, is the guy who masterminded last night's opening ceremonies of the London Olympics, and his use of "Going Underground" (not to mention a snippet of footage from "Trainspotting") was part of an attempt to collapse a few thousand years of British culture into an hour or so. I don't think it was entirely successful, but I have to admit hearing The Jam or The Kinks or Bowie or Queen echoing out of that stadium was a real kick. I even caught Johnny Rotten screamngi "And we don't caaaaaaaaare" when NBC returned from a commercial break, but that's all we yanks got to hear from the Sex Pistols' "Pretty Vacant." If only they would've played "God Save the Queen" ("she ain't no human being") -- but I suppose that's too much for an aging punk fan to hope for. Danny Boyle may love that music, but he also knows where his bread's buttered.

And anyway, getting back to "Going Underground," at least one line in that song perfectly, if inadvertently, reflected on the evening itself. Every time Bob Costas or Meredith Viera or whoever else NBC paid to sit behind a microphone opened their mouths and blathered on pointlessly, a certain lyric came to mind -- namely, the one that's the title of this blog post.

Paul Weller, even 35 years ago, you knew of what you spoke.