sillyI'd never heard of Cliff Richard, and I try to find out all the cultural stuff so I can explain it, so while I was doing other webby things, I looked him up on Wikipedia (hence the link above). That led me, link by link, to the story of a song called "Apache".
You know how there's this one sound-effects scream that's been in literally dozens of movies*? Well, "Apache" is threaded through pop music history in a similar way, if not nearly to the same degree. It stretches from pre-Beatles English pop and Burt Lancaster (playing an Apache!) through surf music, Nixon's second inaugural, possibly the most disturbing music video ever**, and the early rap scene; it lives on today in various hip-hop guises. As Seattle Weekly's Michaelangelo Matos notes in the analysis linked above, the song serves as a snapshot of just how very ... bizarre race relations in America have been:
In other words, a record written by a white Englishman imitating Native Americans as portrayed by white Americans and made famous by a Dane with a vaguely Hawaiian sound, arranged by a Canadian, became the biggest record in [mid-1970s] black New York.Just another web meander ....
* ... and, to introduce an eddy into this stream, a Doctor Who video promotion and video game.
** Oddly enough, I've run across a link to this video before. (Those clothes! That moustache! Those racially offensive bikini outfits!*** That creepy laugh!) Possibly even more oddly, this is the only version of the song I had heard before now.
*** Seriously.
