REVOLVER:It's what you want in a good pop song: a bouncy tune, an upbeat tempo and a happy ending. You get all this, and more, in Amanda Palmer's Oasis.
Even the video for the single is fun, with its riot of primal colours and cast of shiny, happy people. Oasis, which sounds like Avril Lavigne crossed with Girls Aloud, is a song that should be at the very top of the charts.
It won’t ever be. True, the usually conservative BBC has no problem playing Oasis, and it’s freely available for unedited viewing on YouTube. But almost everyone else has banned the song, including so-called indie music outlets NME TV, Kerrang radio and MTV.
The problem is with the lyrics. The song details what happens to a teenage girl who goes to a party and is date-raped. She later has an abortion. At the end of the song, the character sings about how all that has happened to her doesn’t really matter that much because that same day in the post she receives a signed photograph of her favourite band: Oasis.
Palmer is a member of punk- cabaret band The Dresden Dolls. Midway between a singer- songwriter and a performance artist, she is not an identikit female musician.
With her last single, Leeds United, Palmer was disheartened to learn that the record label decided to edit the video for the song "because my stomach didn't look quite flat enough". When Palmer wrote about this on her website (www.amandapalmer.
net), fans sent in photos of their stomachs in a protest against the record company that became known as a “rebellyon”.
Nor is Palmer someone who takes the subject matter of Oasislightly. "The song is an ironic, up-tempo pop song," she says, "which is not as completely tasteless as the references to date-rape and abortion might suggest. It's a musical character study, where the girl is in denial about what is happening to her and prefers to talk about a signed photo from her favourite band instead."
Palmer has two important points to make about the subject matter of her song. The narrative may be about rape and abortion, but the over-riding sentiment is of denial: “It’s about a girl who can’t find it in herself to take her situation seriously. That girl exists everywhere. You probably know her.”
Palmer has experienced both date-rape and abortion, and her motivation behind writing Oasiswas to "process" her own grief. The controversy is that she has expressed her feelings through dark humour. This is where the accusation of "making light" of serious topics stems from.
To counter this Palmer argues, with some degree of wisdom, that if she had placed those lyrics over a sad and downbeat musical backing, then the song would be hailed as an “intimate confessional” – and perhaps particularly so if the liner notes to the song detailed that she was writing from personal experience.
To illustrate the point, Palmer sometimes plays the song in a minor key live. The effect is dramatic. She moves from Avril Lavigne to Tori Amos territory and “art” replaces “bubblegum”.
What Palmer is writing about is a serious mater, and she has every right to play the song in a jocular manner. As she says herself: “When you cannot joke about the darkness in life, that’s when the darkness takes over.”
