There is something slightly uncanny about the musical Marsh family of Faversham in Kent, who recently gathered millions of YouTube views with ‘Gimme Hope Kamala’, their rewrite of Eddy Grant’s ‘Gimme Hope Jo’Anna’.
They are a combination of two big fads of the 70s, The Partridge Family and Jonestown. Mad Ma Marsh in particular has the shining eyes of someone appearing in a slightly different kind of video, containing the words ‘My captors are treating me very well and I now fully support their valiant armed struggle’.
If you really did believe fascism was returning, dropping a comic song on the internet would probably not be your first action
The musical endeavours of this bumptious brood began, like many unpleasant things, during lockdown, when they composed convivial ditties about how jolly awful it was to be sat at home doing nothing much. Not to my taste, no, but heigh-ho.
But ever since there has been a drift in the Marshes’ ‘content’ towards the political, and what passes for the left nowadays. They are not the only ones. The Twitter account Cold War Steve began life as a pleasingly bizarre juxtaposition of the actor Steve ‘Phil Mitchell’ McFadden and Soviet iconography, and gradually metamorphosed into a frothing font of Led by Donkeys-style rubbish. But as we know from the enormous amount of coin accrued by Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, middle class leftists still have, unlike anybody else, money to burn. There’s gold in them thar centrist hills.
So now the Marshes are serving up treats like ‘Bohemian Trumpsody’ – their staring heads shaking with disapproval as they sing, ‘I see a Capitol or Charlottesville again/Grab a noose!/Grab a noose!/ it’s a US Gestapo!/Project 25ing, very very frightening me!’
‘Gimme Hope Kamala’ includes a valiant attempt to rhyme ‘She’ll try to regulate the sale of guns’ with ‘access to healthcare and abortion’. Abortion, whatever your stance on it, isn’t really something you can put in a sprightly calypso. It’s not a word you can belt at the top of your voice, dressed in a colourful shirt and straw hat and shaking maracas.
I’m afraid these latest efforts have a kind of norovirus effect on me. Because if you really did believe fascism was returning, dropping a comic song on the internet would probably not be your first action. Kurt Weill fled from Berlin in March 1933. There would have been actual consequences of him hanging about at the Weimar Kabarett after Hitler’s rise to power. Nothing at all is going to happen to the von Prat family after Trump’s election win.
British people telling Americans what to think is such basic bad manners. I spit on Keir Starmer and all his works, but if some yodelling Yanks piped up with their musical two cents about him I’d be enraged.
Ma and Pa Marsh are a university lecturer and a university administrator, because of course they are. Strangely Mr Marsh, who writes the lyrics, sometimes refers to the Reagan and Bush administrations with fond nostalgia. Anyone who remembers those times will recall people very much like Marsh speaking about Reagan in the same way as people do about Trump now. ‘Reagan’s President-Elect, fascist god in motion!’ artless synth-crunchers Heaven 17 told the nation’s kids in 1981.
How is it best to deliver a satirical comic song? The smirk of self-satisfaction patented by Richard Stilgoe on Nationwide in the 70s makes my teeth itch. Much better to be either blandly amenable like Michael Flanders, or utterly deadpan like Morrissey. In a satirical song, intelligence is essential. Cleverness, or worse obviousness, as in the Marsh melodies, is deadly. A good satirical song should drop difficult-to-answer bombs. Dominic Frisby’s ‘Ballad of Roy Larner’ is a good recent example – it is disturbing, ambiguous, it makes one squirm.
Why do we sing? Because we can’t just say how we feel. But people say the stuff in the Marsh songs, in pretty much exactly the same words, ad nauseam.
Some brittle self awareness is beginning to seep into the Marsh clan. The Trumpsody contains the needled lyric, ‘they’re just some libtards from a cult family, spare us your lies about autocracy’. This breaks two golden rules of satirical songs – don’t let them see you’re annoyed, and don’t repeat your enemy’s attack lines.
But it also speaks to what is sorely lacking in the Marshes and their milieu – the ability not just to laugh at things, which anybody can do, but to laugh things off.
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