BAZ LUHRMANN – "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)"

One of the more unusual hits of 1972 – although in that context it really wasn’t that unusual – was “Desiderata,” the twenties collection of semi-poetic homilies which subsequently became a sixties bedsit poster fixture, now set to music and solemnly recited by the San Franciscan proto-shock jock Les Crane. That its beneficent “go placidly” amble became popular in a particularly bloody year sets out the limits of homilies unaccompanied by active commitment. Gandhi went placidly, but he was leading his people to the Pretoria legislature as opposed to a top-floor Hampstead penthouse.

Like a New Age Billy Bragg, there is something about the Sunscreen Song that sets my teeth on edge, even though I essentially agree with nearly all it has to say and even though it acknowledges its own foredoomed failure at its opening (“The rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience”) and close (“Advice is a form of nostalgia; dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth” – or as Gil Scott-Heron rather more pithily put in his “B-Movie” eighteen years earlier: “People want nostalgia; they want to go as far back as they possibly can, even if it’s only as far back as last week – not to face now or tomorrow but to face backwards”). Listening to its blandly gruff recitative of tips on how to grow and flourish – or how to avoid growing – one can easily understand Brad Pitt’s sideswipe at the piece in Fight Club (subsequently sampled in the Dust Brothers’ “This Is Your Life”). There is a complacency at work here which virtually invites the sceptic to prick its skin.

Luhrmann does not seem to have had any active involvement in the record other than executive producing it; the backing track is a reworking from the Romeo And Juliet soundtrack, which in itself is a cod-operatic/hip hop lite reworking of “Everybody’s Free (To Feel Good),” a major pop-rave hit for Rozalla in 1991, and the narrative is delivered, not by an American, but by an Australian actor pretending to be American – with a nice-ish irony, the actor is named Lee Perry. Musically and conceptually it owes a bundle to Malcolm McLaren’s “Madam Butterfly,” and presumably McLaren must have regularly smacked his forehead for some time afterwards for not coming up with the idea first.

But from another angle, the Sunscreen Song is not entirely free of threats. It is perhaps the second number one of the internet age; its text is taken from a Chicago Tribune thinkpiece written in 1997 by one Mary Schmich – some have fancifully attributed it to Kurt Vonnegut – in the form of a mock-graduation ceremony address to the youth of her day; indeed, on the parent album Something To Remember Perry opens the track by addressing the “class of ‘97” whereas on the single version he now speaks to the “class of ’99.” Despite all of its encouraging and instantly self-deprecating/denigrating grains of generalised advice, the title alone suggests something more sinister. “If I could offer you only one tip for the future,” Perry intones gravely at the beginning, before the music starts up, “sunscreen…would be…it.” And at the end he repeats “but trust me on the sunscreen” as the beats suddenly start slashing backwards like a suicide bomber ready to unzip and unload his cache before an abrupt cutoff. Sunscreen, of course, to ward off cancer engendered by potent sun rays, now unprotected by the ozone layer; thus the battle is already lost, the time finite. This is a manifesto on how best to live one’s remaining time in the face of an encroaching apocalypse. On repeated listening the track seems to become progressively more dreamlike, or maybe nightmarish in its not quite reality, its hidden sabres less than paradisical.

None of this has really pervaded Luhrmann’s work as a director. The Red Curtain Trilogy is the title which has been retrospectively been applied to his sparse triumvirate of films, but apart from a general hopeful camp undertow it’s hard to discern any real link or symmetry of purpose between them; Strictly Ballroom is charming, astute floss. Romeo And Juliet is one of those rare films which visibly dates as you are watching it; for much of its first half, despite the downward-dragging Leonardo DC, I was practically cheering it on, willing it to deal with the chances it was giving itself – but the bravura could not be sustained and the final impression was one of flimsy modishness concealing a basic conjuring trick; not being Orson Welles, Luhrmann couldn’t turn that modest trope into a conquering advantage.

And Moulin Rouge! seemed especially foolish, all the more so for the fleeting specks of magic which crossed its over-coloured, unbreathable environment; Kidman looks and sounds good until you realise she’s not being called upon to do very much. Ewan McGregor, meanwhile, unbalances the film entirely with his grotesque pantomime hamming, and I particularly despise his performance in Kidman’s death scene for how fucking true to life it was. The approach to the Q Magazine-approved list of pop tapestry threads was barely above that of the seventies children’s TV show Crackerjack – and at least Peter Glaze had a firm grasp of his and the programme’s essential absurdity.

So we see a director in love with colour, but not necessarily with reason; who could place Moulin Rouge! next to, say, Kieslowski’s Trois Couleurs: Bleu and not recognise infantile scribbling in close proximity to something which actually tells us about human beings and how they choose to respond to art as stimulant or nemesis? Or to Demy’s sublime anti-confection Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, sung all the way through (and that’s sung, not camped – Jim Broadbent in particular take note) and leading to an ending of inevitable and slowly shattering hopelessness – far less showy and infinitely deeper. Extending this perspective to “Everybody’s Free” we have a spectacle of grudging goodwill from a spirit which secretly knows that the game is up, and it carries more worries than any of Luhrmann’s films. Since starting to write this entry, I’ve changed my mind about the record at least three times; half of me recognises it for the con trick that it is, the other half reads between, or below, the lines and registers eyes of wicked, blood-red coal behind the screen of benignity. I can’t quite recall how I reacted to it at the time. For now, however, an equivocating 5

First time I’ve ever heard this. It’s not what I imagined I needed to avoid in 1999, not at all.

Desiderata was the first thing it reminded me of, as if Les Crane had got his papers to serve as an unwilling soldier in the irony wars. I stuck with it until “dance”, the weird and clunky change of beat, and then gave up.

At least they didn’t get James Alexander Gordon to do it.

Gritted my teeth and got through it all for what I suspect may have been the first time ever. Those little one-word interjections with changes of pace now remind me of Mylo’s Destroy Rock And Roll, when everything stutters for a moment on the mention of “Queen”; lacking Mylo’s sense of humour or the Church Universal And Triumphant’s totally pointless vitriol though, this is just a tacky, gaudy mess.

Pretty much the case for much of Luhrmann, to be honest. Moulin Rouge had pacing issues up the wazoo, Romeo + Juliet was a stupid execution of a stupid concept… and I didn’t realise just how damn long this tripe is either. Yeesh. Evil.

1 is pretty much bang on.

Agreed that Desiderata is a better point of comparison, but the record this, superficially (perhaps excessively long, much spoken-word babbling on, any “tune” almost being an aside) brought to my mind was an early 90s curio from The Shamen, with Timothy Leary doing the (psycho)babbling, “ReEvolution”. Though really they not very alike at all – the Shamen track has real, as you’d expect from them, musical interest and substance, and whatever Leary is doing, he is not coming close to insulting the intelligence of his audience or throwing self-contradictory platitudes at them. In fact, it’s a quite extraordinary record, and one of the more wonderful things to slip into the top 40 in the 90s….

….this, though. Again, who bought it? I’ve no idea. Did it get radio airplay? Not much (or at all) that I recall, but maybe I had the wrong (or right) stations on. Wherein lies its appeal? I wish I knew…..is it perhaps tied in with the opening up of higher education, first under Major, then under Blair…and the ensuing degradation of some degree courses and the blatant commercialisation of others, creating a cohort of graduates who would genuinely appreciate this kind of “pep talk” to push them out into the outside world…? I kind of doubt it…and I can certainly remember nothing of the substance, only the style (wonderfully formal, traditional, almost-six-centuries clad with much Latin and ritual that bore the weight of history and expertise; and then, rather more casual, laid back, conspicuously modern and very smuggly post-enlightenment) of the two such speeches I experienced on graduating. But in neither context would something such as this been welcome.

I don’t find this hateful, just nondescript. There certainly is, as the text’ s origins explain, something of the filmic or mass-communication about this. The style is much more American than British, too. The musical value of the track – or even the contribution of music to it – is minimal indeed (the link to Rozalla only really asserting itself in the title). It’s a real curiously, and perhaps one that does speak, above all, of the broader media and popular culture of 1999 than it does of anything more usually directly related to “popular music” or “the charts”.

At least it did not inspire a string of imitators. It was at least not the Jive Bunny of this year ending in nine. With that in mind, I Think I can stretch to a 4.

Also, growing up in South Shields, I never even saw sunscreen until 1975

One of the Senior Management at the School I taught in at this point was a breathless advocate for Neuro Linguistic Programming – sharing pearls of wisdom such as ‘There’s no such thing as failure -only negative feedback’. This was also the era of conspicuous Spin Doctors (not the band!), whose glib, soothing phrases flowed with ease from the lips of Blair and others. After the confrontational style of Thatcher and her fellow Tories it was tempting to be (half-knowingly) beguiled by the promises of New Labour – things could only get better.
Sunscreen seems to fit very much into this ethos (although the delivery is clunky) as well as looking forward to a slew of TED talks. I can easily imagine it accompanying a soporific Powerpoint presentation with state of the art (1999 style) interslide animation – something else I associate with this era.

I enjoy how the sleeve gives this three different titles.

I thought I read this was some self-consciously ironic DJ push, maybe someone on the Breakfast Show or something. W.r.t. why it made #1, I mean.

Oddly enough the listening public ultimately took this record’s advice i.e quickly forgetting about and dispensing with it. I started wearing sun screen for the first time last year (generally I regard sunbathing as one of life’s most pointless indulgences so i had never seen much need for it before, but then realised that protection was necessary for just walking around outdoors) and yet this track never crossed my mind even once, which seems fair enough, it’s a ploddy distraction of a single that has dated quite badly.
It seems to belong to a sub-genre that could be termed ‘margarine ambient groove’ ultra-lightweight and soporific with an off-putting air of self-satisfaction. Like a lot of actors whose voices are only familiar from adverts (I can think of at least two others but don’t know their names) Lee Perry’s narration is too smugly persuasive to offer any charm, let alone wisdom.
It’s hard to be convinced by Baz Luhrmann’s films – his ‘Romeo & Juliet’ is a film that I liked for it’s vitality when it originally came out but when I last watched it about two years ago what really stood out was how much better Pete Postlethwaite and Miriam Margolyes were at reciting the verse than the rest of the cast. ‘Strictly Ballroom’ has long since been usurped by the tacky but wildly popular TV show that nicked it’s title, as for the blancmange headache of ‘Moulin Rouge’, once was enough.

The music side of this track’s entirely desultory, which leaves us with the text…. Nothing too deep there but I don’t find it as irritating as many do, perhaps because I don’t detect any sneering or any irony whatsoever.

Tom’s remark, “it’s so bloody noncommittal. Every piece of advice comes with a caveat, an opposite to nudge you back onto safer ground. Leave New York before it makes you hard. Leave California before it makes you soft. Don’t worry, or worry. Read the instructions, even if you don’t follow them. Don’t congratulate yourself, don’t berate yourself.’ strikes me as particularly insensitive and misguided. The script has lots and lots of unhedged, categorical pieces of advice; it’s plenty committal. And for example, ‘Don’t congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either’ (which is just correctly considering a couple of distinguishable cases) prefaces ‘all your choices are half chance and so are everyone else’s’. That’s *very* committal and a good rule of thumb. Eggheads like us might wish she’d written something like ‘Beware of making fundamental attribution errors, and police any of your self/other asymmetries with respect to them’ but that’s not the sort of language that most people are in a position to process.

And, for another example, ‘Don’t worry about the future; or worry, but at least know that that’ll be unhelpful’ prefaces ‘The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind’. There’s no lack of commitment or irony there, rather there’s a kind of counsel that’s hard to hear – that the things that are uppermost in one’s consciousness (including one’s fears) are
often superficial, and it’s the nameless problems that you you’re not especially conscious of at the time that get you (hence don’t sweat all your superficial and head-line driven worries).

I *do* hear in the script a bunch of moments that urge trying to live up to some ideal even though you know you’ll fall short (‘read instructions even though you probably won’t follow them’, ‘try to respect your elders’, etc.). But that’s nothing to do with do-nothing, grungy irony.

And I hear moments where the advice ruefully reflects that advice is easy to give but hard to take, etc. (‘Advice is a form of nostalgia’, ‘Never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they have faded. But trust me…’). But self-awareness (assuming it’s not paralysing) is once more nothing to do with irony or glib chortling or whatever Tom tries to stick on it.

One thing that’s a little curious about the column/speech is that it’s *very* short for a Commencement address. Steve Jobs’s famous one at Stanford – http://youtu.be/D1R-jKKp3NA – which was widely shared in the mid-’00s, is 3 times as long as ‘Wear Sunscreen’ and is much more typical.

I agree that the stuff about NYC and NorCal is a little too cute – clearly for a lot of people those places are exactly where they want to be and where they’ll want to stay. The advice in this case seems to betray its Chicago/Midwest origins, i.e., it’s offered principally to stay-at-home Midwest kids in the spirit of mind-opening (the general injunction to ‘Travel’ comes next), and without worrying too much about the ‘you must not stay’ closing-off of options it also calls for (at least lightly).

Anyhow, a strange #1. There was quite a bit of prescriptive prognosticizing going on near the peak of the .com bubble, in Fight Club as Marcello mentions, but also in The Matrix, and at the end of American Beauty:

“I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me… but it’s hard to stay mad, when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst… And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life… You have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m sure. But don’t worry… you will someday.”

@17 On the outbreak of sermonising in the late 90s, I don’t want to be too heavy-handed with the foreshadowing, but at that time we heard a lot about stuff that can seem terribly important when you’re not constantly worrying about paying the rent and staying alive.

Wish the Rozalla song had been number 1 instead. That is far more inspirational, and also much funnier, than EF(TWS)TSS(CO99).

God, listening now, that PF song is way more storming than I remember. Oh, and 3 for Sunscreen.

#7, “At least it did not inspire a string of imitators”: it inspired a parody in Australia, though, which is what I always think of when I think of this. (Oh, I see now that Garry has mentioned it @16.) In fact I actually bought that one, whereas I’m not sure I’d ever heard this in its entirety before today.

Since “Not the Sunscreen Song”, John Safran has made some extraordinary television, although you’ll probably have to visit Oz to find the DVDs. Nevertheless, John Safran’s Music Jamboree and especially John Safran vs God are well worth the viewing time. John Safran’s Race Relations couldn’t quite match its predecessor, but still has its moments.

But to the original… as Tom suggests, it’s a single that would never even have existed today. Some unknown would have beaten Luhrmann to the punch by setting the text to a GarageBand track on a YouTube clip, which would have racked up a few hundred thousand views, and that would have been that. Nobody would have overplayed it, the beauty of those clips being that you watch them only as many times as you personally can stand.

I’m not sure it would even have become a viral video, though, if it were happening today, because it feels as if we’ve been overloaded with commencement speeches (real or imagined) since this was a hit; we read or watch the best of each year’s crop in a way that we never could before the Web. Before the 2000s, the only graduation speeches I’d ever heard were the ones from my own graduation ceremonies. They were scarce commodities even in the late ’90s; now they’re old hat.

So one listen of this was quite enough. 2. Five for Safran (maybe even six; it’s making me laugh again as I listen to it now).

I liked the Luhrmann “trilogy” at the time, and even had a Romeo + Juliet poster on my wall at one point, but I’m happy to leave them as memories rather than rewatch them; I haven’t even seen Australia yet, and missed The Great Gatsby as well. (The last sounds like a perfect fit for Luhrmann and De Caprio, though, so I expect I’ll catch up with it eventually.)

#4, “Slip, slap, slop – or whichever way around the Aussies have it.”

Slip, slop, slap,
Slip on a shirt,
Slop on sunscreen,
And slap on a hat.
Slip, slip, slap (da dahh!),
You can stop skin cancer,
Say:
Slip, slop, slap.

(Yes, I was 12 in 1980 and this is burned into my brain.)

Another parody, courtesy of Chris Rock:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9yBPcn8IqU

But what am I thinking – what you all want to know is, did this song chart in its home country of Australia, where we had been told to wear sunscreen for twenty years (per “Slip, Slop, Slap”, above)?

Nope. The 1998 parent album, Something for Everybody, peaked at number 14, but the 1999 single didn’t chart. That may be because John Safran’s parody had preemptively peaked at #20, thanks to incessant airplay on JJJ in 1998. By the time the song became a minor hit in America and a number one here, we were over it. I suspect that, like me, more young Aussies heard Safran’s parody than the original.

Luhrmann’s version was produced by Nellee Hooper, by the way.

@31 For what it’s worth, Baz did chart in Aus, just below the main chart at a lowly #65. What’s interesting with that is that Safran actually charted first, and Baz didn’t chart until months later, even having already placed very highly in JJJ’s poll for the year prior (which Not The Sunscreen Song never got into). One thing I remember Safran saying somewhat recently is that apparently, a lot of the people buying NTSS did so thinking that it was well, the sunscreen song, but that just wasn’t available, so perhaps they eventually did get it a release to capitalise (just slightly late).

First time commenter also after silently reading for I think over 4 years now, glad to know I’m not alone as one who really can’t stomach this track.

I am astonished.

It somehow bypassed me completely in 1999 as we were probably all still singing Sweet Like Chocolate, so, again for me, it’s that weekend in early January 2004 on VH1 when they played all the #1s of the last 20 years in a row when I first remember hearing this. My initial reaction? Eh, weird.

By the time of its addition of my iTunes four years later, I was captivated by this. The deadpan vocals, the building of the backing track from a simple drumbeat into the increasing additional layers, the brief break between “Sometimes you’re behind” and “The race is long”, and the moment shunned in Tom’s post but to me is the best bit, “Dance!”and that breakbeat coming in, leading to the “Do not read beauty magazines” break and then the only proper instrumental hook of the song.

After that it slightly runs out of its best ideas but it’s still one I absolutely adore, and it’s something I feel somehow idiotic for as it flies in the face of every single comment here. I’m not one for dumb, saccarine novelty tracks but I think this one’s more than that.

It’s my second ten of ’99. I’m so sorry.

Please don’t feel idiotic! Everything that gets to #1 is a 10 to someone, and in an ideal world all those someones would get their moment in the Popular comments box. Thanks for pushing back on my disdain – even though I don’t agree.

I like the observation about the midwestiness of this. For me it connects to a certain idea I have of an American decency you don’t see maybe so much nowadays, for better or worse – concern for others, equivocation, homespun wisdom, a slight inferiority complex, the assurance to have its say, the confidence that you’re entitled to do your own thing anyway and we’ll all be alright in the end. And other things too. You are not alone.

I daren’t listen again now after all these negative comments, but count me in as a higher mark in principle. I always liked Desiderata too.

@21: Well said. We got the wrong Everybody’s Free at #1. The Rozalla hit might comprise unpromising ingredients – Hallmark Mothers Day card lyrics, a token Italo-house piano solo, and like ..Sunscreen, a sheer desperation to unite its audience whether they like it or not. Perhaps the Manics’ “Everybody’s taking drugs because it makes governing easier” from the New Art Riot EP was an answer lyric to such shamelessly commercial, four-to-the-floor rave anthems.

Yet it just about holds everything together and WORKS, and by the end you feel glad it came – it gives you that sense of accomplishment in the everyday, whether it’s a refreshing cold shower, a freshly cooked Sunday roast with all the trimmings, or as I was doing in 1991, successfully riding a bike without stabilisers.

Fast forward eight years and just as I start at a school I shouldn’t have gone to and make foes for life there wasn’t any need to, some Australian director of a film of a Shakespeare play back then I thought was for girls and sissies, who sounds both in name and voice just like his popular Danish butter brand namesake, deliciously slathered across freshly baked crumpets, cutting across the airwaves with this soothing, very middle-American spoken word. A Werther’s Original advert amidst the greasy double-bacon Whopper Offsprings and Sugar Rays of the time. On first listen I actually thought the singer was at least 90 and his name was George Burns or Bob Hope, and he was warming up to do the Funky Chicken at his own wedding anniversary.

But at a time when my nerves were frayed, I had the self-confidence of a gnat, and school “friends” were whispering at me in a bakery on the school French trip “Don’t act like a spastic” or bursting into my bedroom tearing down my Anna Kournikova* poster from Official Playstation Magazine, turning it round to the reverse which was Gabe Logan from Syphon Filter and saying “You should have that instead, you’re gay”, it was a dose of welcome, incongruous light humour, like meeting up with an old, wisecracking long-lost relative. I understand how the conservatism and determinism in the lyrics can hit people right in the irritation zone, but I’m pretty sure it was meant to be tongue-in-cheek from someone who’d been around the block in showbusiness rather than some embarrassing vicar trying to be “down with the kids.” I can stretch to a 6.

One thing’s for sure, though – it’s no Thou Shalt Always Kill.

* Before I realised that from a distance she looked like Matt Lucas.

#35, 37: Even though my assessment of this is much closer to Tom’s, I can actually imagine this as somebody’s 10, and kudos to Billy for not only going against the grain but articulating why. The one thing I’ll say about the consensus hated tracks on here, most but not all of which I also dislike, is that they’re usually at least interesting or unique in some way. Because of this I can actually imagine someone giving “Grandma” or “Itsy Bitsy..” or Jive Bunny a 10. Heck, if I squint hard enough I might even imagine someone giving Robson & Jerome a 10. It’s the relatively boring middle-of-the-road tracks that are rarely actively hated that are harder to imagine as someone’s 10’s. I’d love to hear, just to pick at random, why Peter Andre’s “I Feel You” or 911’s “A Little Bit More” deserve a 10.

From my memory of my sole disgusted listen to it, Thou Shalt Always Kill is a straight zero, which leads me to suspect the whole genre is one I’m just completely allergic to.

#43: Jive Bunny would have been at least a 9 for me at the time (aged 8-9) when I was unfamiliar with the records ‘sampled’ and unaware and unconcerned by the shoddiness of the mixing: it was just a load of great hooks and a fun cartoon character thrown in and as a bonus, grown-ups seemed to hate it.

June 1999, I am, in the eyes of the law anyway, a man. I must have been nearing the end of my A-Levels when this came out. I’ve a sinking feeling I was naive enough to be impressed by the patter on this. Not enough to enjoy it as a record, like I did Jive Bunny but definitely ‘oh yeah, that’s deep’ in a teenage sort of way. I too heard the Vonnegut rumour and was disappointed it wasn’t true (though not in retrospect). A real Kurt Vonnegut #1 (with Fatboy Slim or Mr Oizo maybe?) would have been a wonderful thing.

I’ve always kind of assumed that Baz would have had a memory of this.

I haven’t seen it for a while, but I liked Romeo + Juliet a lot at the time. Moulin Rouge I found entirely indigestible, but then it ticks all the wrong boxes for me (McGregor! Kidman! The songs!)… but people I respect love it.