A song that once mocked, relished and embraced the American Dream in under five minutes has been updated for our contemporary times. Modified for a softer, more tender audience. One that does not do well with nuance and fares poorly when confronted with subtle complications.
Comedian Dennis Leary released the song “Asshole” in 1993. It was the only single from his comedy album No Cure for Cancer and it holds space in a peculiar corner of my mind.
However, it would first peirce my young eardrums via Frosh 1 some five years later circa 1998 at the ripe old age of seven. This particular compact disc belonged to my older brother who was in high school at the time.
According to Wikipedia, “Frosh is a compilation album series, released on Polygram Records in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The albums collect popular party anthems frequently associated with university and college frosh week festivities.”
This checks out with me.
The Big Shiny Tunes series was similar and were more popular among my generation. Although some of those are also nostalgic in their own way, particularly Big Shiny Tunes 5, the music suffered by comparison.
I can vividly remember its blue cover art, peak-nineties font and the host of bangers that were contained within.
Frosh 1 contained such hits as Song 2 by Blur, Blister in the Sun by Violent Femmes, Beastie Boys’ Fight For Your Right (To Party), Iggy Pop’s Lust for Lift, James’ Laid and others. These “popular party anthems” informed my youthful taste and the CD was played into oblivion, scratched to all hell.
It was the CD you slapped into your discman to cut the grass, the one that rang through the basement concrete, roaring over the chaotic slaps of ministicks. The songs filled my head with hopes and dreams of partying my ass off and meeting girls that looked like the ones my older brother would bring around from time to time.
Apologies, I digress sure as a summer day is long but back to Leary. Asshole is the standalone track of the compilation album, even among that eclectic lineup. This was in part because it was a song made by a comedian for the purpose of comedy.
But also, it was dirty, full of cursing. The kind you had to rush to skip when parents were milling about the vicinity. Especially prudish Irish-Catholic ones like mine.
This one had to be listened to in secrecy, which of course only supercharged the humour.
Asshole was Leary’s take on the American Dream if it were soaked in an ironic gumbo for half a century or so. Something that we take for granted now in an era of unlimited free Micheal Moore-style documentaries and endless satire stamped into the ground like a cigarette butt with a foot that twists with disdain.
At the time however, it felt fresh.
It was about your average white suburbanite slob who liked football, porno and books about war. However, as this was not enough to keep a man like that interested, he would go out of his way to do asshole things, such as piss on public toilet seats and walk around in the Summer time, saying, “How about this heat?”
So when I was surfing Youtube one night in moonlit stupor and I saw a thumbnail of Jimmy Fallon with the title “A**hole” Song with Denis Leary, I just about choked up my cheesies.
I was shocked. There is no way on God’s green earth that the execs down at bigwig television are going to let him sing that song with lyrics like that. Fallon’s not built for that sort of thing.
I thought to myself…holy shit, maybe the culture really is changing. Maybe we’re shifting back to an era I could remember. When you more or less had carte blanche to push the envelope so long as you were attempting to be funny.
It raised the corners of my lips ever so slightly. Hell, we may get out of this thing just yet.
Truth be told. I’d forgotten about the song. Despite my earlier ramblings of praise, a couple decades of boozing and this and that will have the effect on a man. I could almost smell the freshly cut grass, feel the thistle chunks nicking my shins from the mower blower.
I clicked play and got comfortable. A duet with old Leary and Fallon to serenade me down memory lane.
But as soon as Leary launched into the first verse, I knew that I’d been had. How could I be so stupid. Did you really think they were gonna say, “sometimes, I park in handicapped spaces while handicapped people make handicapped faces” on network television? What are you retarded?
No, they hit the audience with audacious lines like “I log into Amazon, leave one star reviews” and talk about starting a mosh pit at a Taylor Swift concert.”
The only notable applause from the crowd came when Fallon referenced unwittingly singing the lyrics Wicked songs, a Broadway play.
“I show up to AA and pass around a flask, I know I have COVID and don’t wear a mask.”
Quality stuff. Enough to make any church choir tee-hee when the priest wasn’t looking.
The closest they come to referencing handicap parking talks about how they would be “out of luck, because I took up two spaces with my cybertruck.”
By this point in the song I knew the bridge rant wasn’t coming, which is of course, the best part of the original. It is as follows:
“You know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna get myself a 1967 Cadillac Eldorado convertible. Hot pink with whale skin hubcaps and all leather cow interior. And big brown baby seal eyes for head lights Yeah. And I’m gonna drive in that baby at 115 miles per hour. Gettin’ one mile per gallon Sucking down Quarter Pounder cheeseburgers from McDonald’s in the old fashioned non-biodegradable styrofoam containers.And when I’m done sucking down those greaseball burgers. I’m gonna wipe my mouth with the American flag. And then I’m gonna toss the styrofoam containers right out the side. And there ain’t a goddamn thing anybody can do about it You know why? Because we’ve got the bomb, that’s why. Two words: nuclear fucking weapons, okay? Russia, Germany, Romania, they can have all the democracy they want. They can have a big democracy cakewalk. Right through the middle of Tiananmen Square. And it won’t make a lick of difference. Because we’ve got the bombs, okay? John Wayne’s not dead, he’s frozen. And as soon as we find a cure for cancer. We’re gonna thaw out the Duke, and he’s gonna be pretty pissed off. You know why? Have you ever taken a cold shower? Well, multiply that by fifteen million times. That’s how pissed off the Duke’s gonna be. I’m gonna get the Duke, and John Cassavetes. And Lee Marvin, and Sam Peckinpah, and a case of whiskey. And drive down to Texas.”
Yeah, that part didn’t make it either.
Seeing a man gussy up his magnum opus to appease a contemporary crowd isn’t just sad from a purist vantage point, it’s the fact that it was a comedian of all people to do it. These cowards also claim to champion free speech until someone cuts a cheque.
Especially Leary, a man who throughout the nineties positioned himself as a bad boy of the burgeoning comedy scene. He released albums titled No Cure For Cancer, Lock n’ Loaded
This rendition wasn’t about your “regular Joe with a regular job” that all stripes could relate to. The first was of course political commentary, but less pointed.
What made the original great was that it was both a criticism and a celebration of the American Dream. Sure, no one likes an asshole who throws the McDonalds trash out the window, but how about a country where you can wipe your greasy mouth with its flag.
It was just some entirely new version save for the course. Introducing it to a whole new generation without teeth.
It reminded me that old Orwellian passage, “every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
You’re still an asshole Dennis, but now for entirely different reasons.