If you’re one of the millions who bought Sandi Thom’s “I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker (With Tanya’s Gob In my Face)” then you’ll surely be on the lookout for something else that combines half-baked sentiment, trite generalisation and tuneless howling in exactly those addictive measures.
Step forward…Sandi Thom! Who now brings us “When Horsepower Meant What It Said”. Really this post should be called “IHM Title Watch” as this song clues you in to its idiocity from the very beginning. WHY OH WHY moans grumpy old Sandi, did we ever stop riding horses, given that sometimes you get stuck in traffic.
I’ve got a hundred horses hidden in between my wheels
but i can’t put my foot down and jumped the fences in the field
i. Horses jumping fences in fields are going round in circles. ii. What is she doing driving into a field anyway, the silly mare? JUST TAKE THE TUBE NEXT TIME.
Maybe she is upset she didn’t make the celebrity cut for “Only Fools On Horses”. But the song continues:
How easily forgotten,
How easily we’re led
How hard the path is trodden
From when horsepower meant what it said.
Eh? Watt? Sandi, the term Horsepower wasn’t invented to talk about horses! It was invented as a marketing tool for steam engines, to show that they could DO MORE THAN A HORSE. Horsepower has always meant exactly what it means today, in other words. A horse, incidentally, has less than 1 horsepower, i.e. it is worse than a car in all but one aspect – a horse does not generally come with a stereo.
And if we’re keeping up with progress why am i standing still
maybe we should take a walk and talk to the horses on the hill
Here is the crux of the matter. Perhaps the reason Sandi is an (evolutionary) standstill is that she believes horses can talk (possibly she formed this conclusion at her album playback, after learning they could sing). If she did go and talk to the horses on the hill they would tell her “Neigh”. And so say we all.