Don't Lose Amanda Palmer!

Oi, MTV! Play Amanda Palmer's Oasis vid on your channel! And you, too, NME! And Q! Don't be such babies!

Amanda sez:
my label in the UK has been gearing up to promote “oasis” as a radio and video single.
a few days before i left for london i got this email from someone at roadrunner:

”Hi Emily/Amanda,

Hope you are both well,
I just thought I’d let you know that we have been met by fierce opposition on the Oasis track.
Which is disheartening, as combined with the video, we all felt it was a great promotional tool and track.
All our TV outlets have refused to play the video due to it “making light of rape, religion and abortion”. This is the audio as well as visual.
Many of the stations like the track, and even the video but are bound by strict broadcasting rules. I personally find this quite ridiculous.”

dude.
wasn’t this the UK, land of black humor blacker than blackest black itself?

i emailed back and asked which outlets. the reply:

”NME tv, Scuzz, kerrang, MTV, Q, the box … to name a few. There is only a few networks: bauer, chartshow and MTV. They control all stations and they all had the same issue….”

and i sat there thinking, wow. here we go again.
why can’t ANYTHING just be effing EASY this year?

it isn’t a simple issue, obviously. but the fundamentals seem clear to me.

i sat down one day in or around 2002 and wrote a tongue-in-cheek, ironic up-tempo pop song.
a song about a girl who got drunk, was date raped, and had an abortion.
she sings about these things lightly and joyfully and says that she doesn’t care that these things have happened to her because oasis, (her favorite band) has sent her an autographed photo in the mail. and to make things even better (!!), her bitchy friend melissa, who told the whole school about the abortion, is really jealous.

....if you cannot sense the irony in this song, you’re about two intelligence points above a kumquat."