Xenophobia Repeats Itself

This past weekend I was driving from garage sale to garage sale. I only picked up a few records and just listened to them today, and boy-oh-boy one of them is a gem. It's a 45 by a band called A.L. Kammen and the Bachelor Pad. The album is from 1984 and the A-side is a song called "Go Back to Chicago (I'm From Waunakee)" and has a hand-written note "To Drew and Jan Love ya, Alan Kammen."

  This song is incredible and very important...and here, you can hear it...Go on, Listen:

So, as you have heard the entire song  is about Wisconsinites not liking rich Chicago girls who come to school in Madison, spending daddy's money, complaining about lack of culture etc.

SOUND FAMILIAR?

For those of you who don't live in Madison, I submit for your consideration a the 2009 smash hit, youtube sensation "Coastie Song (What's a Coastie)" by the unfortunately named group Zooniversity:

As you have heard, these so two songs are about the same thing. The coastie phenomenon that seemingly emerged in Madisonin the mid 90's has deeper roots than we think. (see the wikipedia article and its referenced articles, as I don't want to go into the details:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastie)

It is not surprising that Wisconsinites resent outsiders with $ and "culture" who come here and criticize the Wisconsin way of life (if there is such a thing). What is amazing though, is that two local Madison bands twenty-five years apart both wrote basically the same song focusing on outsider WOMEN who are insensitive and monied . The obvious differences in these two tracks is also telling. What "Go Back To Chicago" achieves with self deprecation and folksy colloquialism ("dagnabbit ya spd'ox...But then what the hell do I know, I come from Waunakee"), "Coastie Song" attempts with machismo swagger and anti-Semitism (or at least Semitic identificationism). Musically these songs are extremely similar, even though they are of different genre, their structure is almost identical and both are simplistic, paired down examples of their respective styles. 

Of high interest is that in both of these songs the singer mimics the voice of the outside female:

"Go Back To Chicago" has that long run starting at 1:38

"Oh Gawd, the food here is just aweful, all they eat is brats and beer..."

"Coastie Song" dose this twice, first affecting the Long Island accent of these JAPs at 2:03 

"with they I-Pawd"         

and then again at 2:07 "I hyave a questiaaan"

Again the difference here is that the 1984 song lends these girls an air of sophistication, albeit annoying, while 2009 portrays these girls as stupid and materialistic (as opposed to cultured and materialistic.) 

There's lots to go on about, but I will end with the fact that both of these songs gained these respective groups some notoriety. "Coastie Song," is famous, that is according to Zooniversity themselves, and "became extremely popular on college campuses all over the nation, in the midwest especially." 

Simmilarly "Go Back to Chicago" made A.L. Kammen and the Bachelor Pad well known in their own right. Alan Kammen (frontman) explains that at the time he "didn't think that the CD thing was going to catch on, so I pressed 500 45s. We sold them all, which kept us in Leiney's for about, oh, 3 months." (Leiney's being a reference to Leinenkugel's beer). Beyond that, the drummer on "Go Back to Chicago" is none other than Butch Vig, who went on to produce Nirvana's "Nevermind" and start the bang Garbage.

Lastly, I have to bring up the question of whether or not the Zooniversity boys knew about "Go Back to Chicago" while writing "Coastie Song." There are some things that seem to point to the fact that they did. Both songs have parenthetical subtexts: "Go Back to Chicago (The Waunakee Son)" and "Coastie Song (What's a Coastie?). As well as the "Why the fuck are they even calling me a caostie? I'm not even from the fucking coast, I'm from Chicago." that comes up at the end of "Coastie Song." Then again, I may be giving Zooniversty too much credit, which is entirely possible.