Pay No Mind to That Band Behind the Curtain

I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna really really really wanna zig zig ha.

--Spice Girls

Mmm bop, ba duba dop, ba du bop, ba duba dop, ba du bop, ba du.

--Hanson

Those are the deathless words of 1997--along with Prodigy’s “smack my bitch up,” of course.

But this column is not about words. It’s about action--the kind of action Pop Eye honored last year by naming our annual dubious distinction awards after Jarvis Cocker, the singer of the English band Pulp.

Cocker, you may recall, jumped onstage during Michael Jackson’s self-glorifying performance at the 1996 Brit Awards show in London and did a little tushy-shaking dance to mock the absurdity of it all.

This year we could have used an army of Jarvises to shake a little booty at all who did their part to make a mockery of that wonderful world we call pop music. But one act stands above, symbolizing the wealth of absurdity. The problem is that no one has stepped forward to take credit for this noble act.

So the Jarvis ’97 must go to an unknown soldier: Whoever it was who had enough time on his or her hand to discover that if you play Pink Floyd’s 1973 album “Dark Side of the Moon” while watching “The Wizard of Oz”--starting the music precisely at the third roar of the MGM lion--the music and images match with spooky synchronicity. Checking this out became the greatest pop waste of time since the whole Paul-is-dead thing nearly 30 years ago.

A couple of highlights:

* The tornado’s arrival in the film coincides with the swirling song “The Great Gig in the Sky.”

* The Floyd song “Brain Damage” plays while the Scarecrow sings “If I Only Had a Brain.”

“If I only had a life” is more like it. But then, it was that kind of year in music, when the industry seemed most geared toward those with too-short attention spans (the ska and pop explosions) or too-long memories (the Fleetwood Mac reunion and the Rolling Stones rolling again).

But who are we to talk? Apparently not having enough life to deal with our-selves, we came up with a few other film-music pairings that just might be worth trying.

How about the Beatles’ “White” album for D.W. Griffith’s KKK-friendly “Birth of a Nation”? The Village People’s “Macho Man” for Charlton Heston’s portrayal of Michelangelo in “The Agony and the Ecstasy”? Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” for the nun biopic “Song of Bernadette”? And, finally, the 1910 Fruitgum Company’s “Yummy Yummy Yummy” for “Tora! Tora! Tora!”

ZIGGY STOCKBROKER: David Bowie cashed in on his back catalog of songs by offering financial bonds against future earnings, with the whole package snapped up by Prudential to the tune of a reported $55 million. With La Bowie staging one of his now countless returns to visibility with a concert tour (which featured many of the very songs he’d banked on), and with “Heroes” featured in a big Microsoft TV commercial campaign, Bowie Bonds looked like a more solid investment than the shaky stock market. The man who sold the world, indeed.

CRUED: Motley Crue welcomed singer Vince Neil back into the band and launched a comeback. Maybe they shouldn’t have bothered--more people have seen bootleg copies of the home video of drummer Tommy Lee and wife Pamela Anderson Lee than heard the Crue’s new album.

COMMERCIALS KILLED THE VIDEO STAR: It was a great year for music videos--not on MTV, where videos still took a back seat to other programming, but in commercials, where rock was a bigger presence than ever. Among the highlights were Burger King’s use of ‘70s classics (our favorite was Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” for a smoked bacon cheeseburger, with the line on screen reading “Smoke on the Whopper”) and the Volkswagen spot featuring two losers driving around to Trio’s 1982 minimalist wonder “Da Da Da.”

Low points included the quasi-Muzak version of the Stones’ “Brown Sugar” used to hawk a liqueur. The best music video of the year may have been the choreographed spectacle of the Presidents of the United States of America’s version of Ian Hunter’s “Cleveland Rocks” opening “The Drew Carey Show” this season.

CAT FIGHTS: Keith Richards, known for saying whatever comes into his mind, dismissed Elton John’s effort with “Candle in the Wind 1997,” transformed from a Marilyn Monroe tribute into a eulogy for Princess Diana, by stating that John’s main talent is for “writing songs for dead blonds.” John retorted by disparaging Richards’ role in the Rolling Stones, saying, “He’s so pathetic, poor thing. It’s like a monkey with arthritis trying to go onstage and look young.”

Um, gentlemen, it was lyricist Bernie Taupin who wrote the words to both “Candle” versions anyway.

Meanwhile, an apparently long-simmering feud between Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell boiled over in September when Browne said in a Dallas Morning News interview that Mitchell was “not very well” and “not a happy person” and that she was “carrying a torch” for him some 20 years after they were a couple. The comment came in reference to Mitchell’s 1994 song “Not to Blame,” which seemed to target statements by actress Daryl Hannah that then-boyfriend Browne had beaten her. Browne has vehemently maintained that the charges were false.

THE HALL BALL OF WAX: Steely Dan founders Walter Becker and Donald Fagen turned the group’s new eligibility for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame into an Internet art project, posting on their Web site (https://www.steelydan.com) a series of surreal letters mocking the absence at the January inductions of both Neil Young (who was to be inducted as a member of the Buffalo Springfield) and Mitchell and suggesting that the duo should find a “love child” as Mitchell had last year. Along the way, Becker and Fagen also raised the issue of just who should be inducted as members of Steely Dan, which in its later years was the two and their hand-picked studio musicians.

The Hall of Fame nominating committee rendered the whole matter moot by not even putting the Dan on the ballot this year.

PENALTY FLAG: New England Patriots quarterback Drew Bledsoe looked more like a blitzing lineman when, after being invited onstage at a November concert by the band Everclear, he exited by diving into the crowd, allegedly injuring a woman. Then there was sports commentator Lee Hamilton of Southern California radio station XTRA-AM (690), who kept mispro-nouncing “mosh” as if it rhymed with “gauche” when he referred to Bledsoe’s jump into the mosh pit.

ROCK THE WHITE HOUSE: Some would consider it a demotion, but the Boston rocker who uses the name Lord Rockingham in the band the Upper Crust--which performs in Louis XIV-era wigs and face powder--took leave from the group to accept an offer to join President Clinton’s staff as a speech writer. His real name is Ted Widmer, and his non-rockin’ credentials include a stint as a history and literature lecturer at Harvard and a recent fellowship at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African-American Research. But given his nom de stage (pardon our French) and those of such bandmates as Lord Bendover and Jackie Kickassis, it’s probably best that he wasn’t asked to help name the new White House puppy.

SECTS SELL: After helping boost Marilyn Manson’s profile, conservative religious groups turned up the heat on the Walt Disney Co. after the release on its Hollywood Records subsidiary of “The Great Milenko” by Detroit’s potty-mouthed Insane Clown Posse. Disney, already under fire for its ABC-TV show “Ellen” and other television and film projects, pulled the album the day it was released and dropped the act.

Known mostly for spraying Faygo soda pop on its audiences, the inane clowns were suddenly a cause celebre. They signed a million-dollar deal with Island Records and went on to sell a solid 350,000 copies of the album.

G WIZ: Hip-hopper Warren G filed suit in October against country music’s one-man-conglomerate Garth Brooks, claiming that Brooks’ use of the lower-case letter “g” as his logo infringed on the rapper’s trademark name. So that explains all the guys going to rap concerts wearing cowboy hats! Still waiting for Kenny G to weigh in on this, though.

PAUL IS NUDE: Paul McCartney agreed to cut a scene of a man and a woman swimming naked in a river from his recent video for the song “Beautiful Night” after learning that two British TV stations were going to trim it themselves if he didn’t. The video was jokingly referred to as “Hey Nude.”

RESPECT YOUR ELDERS: Or is that recycle? In any case, several prominent artists from past eras made some extra cash when their songs were sampled for new hits:

* Janet Jackson built her song “Got Til It’s Gone” from Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi”;

* Puff Daddy turned the Police’s “Every Breath You Take” into “I’ll Be Missing You” and David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” into “Been Around the World” (more return on the Bowie Bonds!);

* Techno artist Fat Boy Slim used an Yvonne Elliman version of the Who’s “I Can’t Explain” as the basis of “Goin’ Out of My Head”;

* And British rockers the Verve sampled an orchestral version of the Rolling Stones’ “The Last Time” in “Bitter Sweet Symphony.”

But what goes around comes around: The Stones’ “Anybody Seen My Baby” sounded enough like k.d. lang’s “Constant Craving” that the the band agreed to list lang and her co-writer, Ben Mink, as composers alongside Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.