Uh. Yesterday was Monday, wasn't it? So much for remembering what day of the week it is over the summer! (Even with the two-day-out-of-seven breaks from model running...)
So you get a Tuesday song. Who decided Monday, anyway? WHO?
In honor of two-weeks-ago's earthquake, I think it's time for a Los Angeles Falling Into The Ocean song. There are a quite a lot of songs that fall into this category on the Playlist, and most of them are quite upbeat. The general consensus among the songs of the Playlist is that San Francisco must be saved and should be revered for persevering despite San Andreas' blows, but that the loss of Los Angeles will benefit the world at large. Also, the singers in the LA-based songs don't generally seem to give a crap that their city is falling down, while it is far more serious business for the SF songs. I think this ties into the whole SoCal Denial thing when it comes to nature, but that's a rant for another post.
This week's song may be one of the silliest on the list. I've mentioned it in this blog before, but I feel it deserves its own post, since it made me laugh so hard that I wheezed the first time I heard it. Despite its unoriginal title, "Earthquake Song," by The Little Girls, is a real gem.
The Little Girls are a pop/new wave band based in Santa Monica. They were popular in the 1980s for goofy novelty songs like this one, but their MySpace seems to indicate that they're still going strong as a group, and even have a new album out. "Earthquake Song" was on their 1983 release, "No More Vinyl." I don't know what time of year this came out, and I haven't googled up anything about the specific impetus for the writing of the song, so I'm not going to claim it's related to the 2 May 1983 Coalinga quake, nor a delayed reaction to the 1979 Imperial Valley quake. I'm just guessing that quakes on the news sparked this song, since they're not often discussed in the mainstream media unless one has just happened.
The music to this song is a classic example of a SoCal surf song. It has all the right driving guitar rhythms and riffs, drum punctuations, vocal harmonies, and backup/contrapuntal lines. If you weren't listening to the words, you might almost take it as a girl group covering a Beach Boys song. But because this music is so dead on to the genre, it allows the words to really shine in context.
Here are the lyrics in full:
There's gonna be an earthquake in this town
There will be houses falling down
The fire hydrants will blow up
The streets will crack
The pipes will pop
It's going kill my mom and dad
They are the only folks I had
But they better not blame me
'Cause it's not my fault
It's always fun living in L.A.
Always a good show on somewhere
What more can I say
There's gonna be an earthquake
I can't miss it, no way
I'm gonna run, run, run
We're having so much fun
'Cause there's a building chasing me
Smack, smack, I just fell in a crack
And now I'm gonna be debris.
There's going to be an earthquake in this town
The dogs are chasing their tails around
There's a buzzing in the air
Maybe I'll die, but I don't care
My surfboard's ready for the tidal wave
I'm gonna ride down Sunset like a Beach Boy today
I only hope I don't wipe-out in West L.A.
Yes, I enjoy living life this way
Always a good show on somewhere
What more can I say
It's gonna be an earthquake
I can't miss it, no way
I'm gonna run, run, run
We're having so much fun
There's a building chasing me
Jump up. Jump back
Break your mother's back
And we'll all fall in the sea
Wheeeee!
It's always fun living in L.A.
Always a good show on somewhere
What more can I say
It's gonna be an earthquake gonna get me
It's gonna be an earthquake gonna get me
It's gonna be an earthquake gonna get me today
Let us review:
Reference to LA treating nature as another showbiz spectacle that'll be out of the news as soon as the next celebrity dates someone new? Check.
Surfing the seismic waves and tsunamis? Check.
Reference to all kinds of earthquake foreboding myths? Check.
Reference to the actual Beach Boys? Check.
Falling into the ocean? Bring it on!
Pun on "fault"? Of course!
I also adore the part about "a building chasing me." It's such a silly mental image in and of itself, even without context, but it becomes more ridiculous when one considers how it's a cheery and blithe reference to outrunning buildings that have been shaken to the point of collapse. Apparently it's ok to discuss damage when it's worded in a silly way, but better not to address it directly until it happens...
Glaringly '80s video of a live performance of "Earthquake Song"
Showing posts with label falling into the ocean. Show all posts
Showing posts with label falling into the ocean. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
The Nevada Beachfront
When I told my friends on the East Coast that I was moving out to California for grad school, many of them responded with comments like, "Please move back east before California falls into the ocean," or, "Be sure to buy a life vest once you're out there!" When I explained in turn that there was no such danger, illustrated with highly-technical sliding of hands past each other to explain the term "strike slip," most of those friends then told me that I was taking them way too seriously on their comments. One, however, still told me not to jump on the San Andreas Fault, just in case.
The fact that this came up in casual conversation with so many people, even on the East Coast, is only a small sign of how pervasive this misconception is. It's become a part of pop culture even more than it's something people actually worry about - well, I certainly hope it's more pop culture than genuine belief, but that would be a hard thing to gauge, and my circle of nerdy friends is probably not the best place to calculate such things. A quick Google search for "California fall into ocean" reveals all too many sites, some of which are those user-asks-question-another-user-answers database sorts of things, which assert that a big splashdown is imminent (this makes one wonder about the credibility of the other information on those question sites). And friend of mine did tell me recently that one of his relatives moved out of California after Northridge and bought a map with the supposed new West Coastline of the United States. One also has to wonder if that map was drawn as a joke, or if the mapmaker is hoping to use those funds from the maps to move away from the supposed sinking slab.
In some ways, the concept of the entirety of California going down doesn't seem too far fetched. This is, after all, a state that routinely has hundreds of square miles catch on fire, where even a moderate amount of rain sends people out sandbagging to curb any neighborhood-demolishing debris flows, where even not-The-Big-One can pancake high rises every decade or so. Not to mention those extremely-poorly-placed beach clifftop houses that do tend to surf the mass wasting events and wipe out in the water. It doesn't seem strange at all that an active imagination used to seeing such stories on the news might extrapolate to an even larger-scale disaster. No matter how much that thought may worry the imaginer, it only becomes truly troublesome when the actual science that disproves the myth gets ignored.
The California falling into the ocean myth actually predates much of the science that disproves it. Though I haven't been able to find any specific date or single source for the origin of this misconception, I have seen references to it in relation to the 1906 San Francisco quake. Following that temblor, all sorts of exaggerated "news" stories wired across the country, including one that the strong shaking had brought the ground under San Francisco down along with the city's buildings; this story quickly expanded to encompass all of California going under. When the San Andreas Fault was eventually blamed for the temblor and mapped out as extending through most of the state, the potential for more earthquakes and the clear line of breakage could have only fed the thought among the non-scientifically-inclined.
(This leads to a sub-misconception. Every version of the story I've seen cites the San Andreas as the line on which the break will occur, but many seem, well, shaky on where the Fault actually is. Some put it as the geographical line that separates California from Nevada. A great many other retellings of the story say that Los Angeles in particular will be swimming with the fishes, with no particular mention of San Francisco, San Diego, or especially not San Bernardino going along with it.)
The best way to fend this one off is, I think, better geology classes earlier on in school. None of this waiting until 12th grade to take a senior “slacker class” business – that’s more than enough time for the conspiracy theorists to get to someone. I don’t think any basic part of this misconception is too complicated to explain to someone in, say, middle school, if not even earlier.
But for all I hope people stop actually believing that California really is going to break off at the San Andreas Fault during a major earthquake and fall into the ocean, I would be sad if the idea faded away from the silly pop culture side of things. Without this myth, there wouldn’t have been those gloriously terrible sequences at the climax of the 1978 Superman movie, in which Lex Luthor implodes the Carrizo Plain section of the fault (highlighting another Faults Don’t Work That Way myth), then Superman flies inside the magma-ridden(!) crevasse to fix it, prompting the exact same footage of the collapse to be shown in reverse. Nor could that popular “End of the World” flash cartoon (NSFW for four-letter words) have gone quite as far with the silliness as it did. And this story has also prompted its fair share of songs, from Tool’s angry-good-riddance "Aenima" (also language NSFW), to Cass Elliott’s happy-good-riddance "California Earthquake", and the more obscure LA-based Little Girls’ perfect parody on SoCal surf tune style "Earthquake Song". Once people can recognize misconceptions as nothing more than that, why not have fun with them?
The fact that this came up in casual conversation with so many people, even on the East Coast, is only a small sign of how pervasive this misconception is. It's become a part of pop culture even more than it's something people actually worry about - well, I certainly hope it's more pop culture than genuine belief, but that would be a hard thing to gauge, and my circle of nerdy friends is probably not the best place to calculate such things. A quick Google search for "California fall into ocean" reveals all too many sites, some of which are those user-asks-question-another-user-answers database sorts of things, which assert that a big splashdown is imminent (this makes one wonder about the credibility of the other information on those question sites). And friend of mine did tell me recently that one of his relatives moved out of California after Northridge and bought a map with the supposed new West Coastline of the United States. One also has to wonder if that map was drawn as a joke, or if the mapmaker is hoping to use those funds from the maps to move away from the supposed sinking slab.
In some ways, the concept of the entirety of California going down doesn't seem too far fetched. This is, after all, a state that routinely has hundreds of square miles catch on fire, where even a moderate amount of rain sends people out sandbagging to curb any neighborhood-demolishing debris flows, where even not-The-Big-One can pancake high rises every decade or so. Not to mention those extremely-poorly-placed beach clifftop houses that do tend to surf the mass wasting events and wipe out in the water. It doesn't seem strange at all that an active imagination used to seeing such stories on the news might extrapolate to an even larger-scale disaster. No matter how much that thought may worry the imaginer, it only becomes truly troublesome when the actual science that disproves the myth gets ignored.
The California falling into the ocean myth actually predates much of the science that disproves it. Though I haven't been able to find any specific date or single source for the origin of this misconception, I have seen references to it in relation to the 1906 San Francisco quake. Following that temblor, all sorts of exaggerated "news" stories wired across the country, including one that the strong shaking had brought the ground under San Francisco down along with the city's buildings; this story quickly expanded to encompass all of California going under. When the San Andreas Fault was eventually blamed for the temblor and mapped out as extending through most of the state, the potential for more earthquakes and the clear line of breakage could have only fed the thought among the non-scientifically-inclined.
(This leads to a sub-misconception. Every version of the story I've seen cites the San Andreas as the line on which the break will occur, but many seem, well, shaky on where the Fault actually is. Some put it as the geographical line that separates California from Nevada. A great many other retellings of the story say that Los Angeles in particular will be swimming with the fishes, with no particular mention of San Francisco, San Diego, or especially not San Bernardino going along with it.)
The best way to fend this one off is, I think, better geology classes earlier on in school. None of this waiting until 12th grade to take a senior “slacker class” business – that’s more than enough time for the conspiracy theorists to get to someone. I don’t think any basic part of this misconception is too complicated to explain to someone in, say, middle school, if not even earlier.
But for all I hope people stop actually believing that California really is going to break off at the San Andreas Fault during a major earthquake and fall into the ocean, I would be sad if the idea faded away from the silly pop culture side of things. Without this myth, there wouldn’t have been those gloriously terrible sequences at the climax of the 1978 Superman movie, in which Lex Luthor implodes the Carrizo Plain section of the fault (highlighting another Faults Don’t Work That Way myth), then Superman flies inside the magma-ridden(!) crevasse to fix it, prompting the exact same footage of the collapse to be shown in reverse. Nor could that popular “End of the World” flash cartoon (NSFW for four-letter words) have gone quite as far with the silliness as it did. And this story has also prompted its fair share of songs, from Tool’s angry-good-riddance "Aenima" (also language NSFW), to Cass Elliott’s happy-good-riddance "California Earthquake", and the more obscure LA-based Little Girls’ perfect parody on SoCal surf tune style "Earthquake Song". Once people can recognize misconceptions as nothing more than that, why not have fun with them?
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