The BPA Blast from the Past (Well From This Summer Anyway)

Isn’t it funny how listening to a song a second time gives you a completely different experience from the first time you heard it? Countless times I have listened a song, or an entire album for that matter, and disliked it the first time only to come back to it a second (sometimes third or fourth) time and wonder why I didn’t like it in the first place. Well, it has happened again. This summer I heard a little ditty by The BPA (The Brighton Port Authority) another pseudonym for Norman Cook a.k.a. Fatboy Slim. The particular song I heard featured David Byrne and Dizzee Rascal laying down the vocal tracks and was entitled “Toe Jam.” It was originally released in July of this year and I remember hearing about it through the likes of Pitchfork Media. I remember the song being a fun to listen to, but nothing very memorable. Recently I was perusing Pitchfork.tv’s best music videos of 2008 when I saw the video for the aforementioned song. Perhaps it was all the beautiful, naked women, or the clever use of censor bars, but this time the song really got me. The light poppy beat paired with Byrne’s lyrics and an interlude from Rascal make for a highly listenable song. Upon hearing this song again I decided to do a little research on The BPA and found this up on their website:

The Brighton Port Authority were an outfit who built a huge word-of-mouth reputation on England's south coast from the early 1970s onwards before petering out in the mid-'90s. From what can be easily pieced together, they were a loose-limbed jamming unit, originally known as the Brighton Phonographic Association. At its core were local musicians Norman Cook and Simon Thornton who gathered various singers and session men around them, built the rather ramshackle BPA studio, and would occasionally hold multi-day warehouse parties from which their semi-legendary reputation stems.

The BPA certainly has a reputation and they live up to it on this song. “Everyday is fucking perfect, it’s a paradise,” Byrne’s lyric pretty much sums up the songs upbeat rhythm and theme. Dizzee keeps the lightheartedness going as he raps, “I'm skankin, I'm Bazzer Raseal, I'm drunk off that heathenisms/I ain't sober, I don’t mix with coca cola, or sober.” All in all “Toe Jams” delivers a jocular tune that brings a little bit of summer (appropriate to its release date) to your cold December days.