Birthday Number 1s: 2010 - We No Speak Americano

We No Speak Americano - Yolanda B Cool and DCUP

You know the one. Must have heard it 100 times without quite knowing what it was. I think when I came to this year and saw this title, I created a whole different song in my head, some kind of combination of Bodak Yellow and Pretty Fly for a White Guy. 

But this is this. Pretty hard to escape - it's in all the jolly, red bull fevered films like Madagascar and The Inbetweeners and Peter Rabbit. Annoying but solid content. It's not much of anything but you can see why it was a hit. Yolanda B Cool and D Cup were Australian and they didn't have any other hits. The name Yolanda B Cool is a quote from Pulp Fiction which I happened to watch a bit of yesterday. I saw someone on twitter last week post "Crazy how, after 30 years, the debuts of Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson are still their best films" ... and when people said "what about Pulp Fiction", he doubled down and said "no one really rates it anymore" People really do relentlessly put any old shit on twitter. Authoritatively. 

Anyway, this is basically a speeded up version of Tu Vuò Fà L'Americano, a very famous Neapolitan song we all know. When I heard this song, I thought about Jude Law, so I'll write about Jude Law.

Jude Law's a bit like Ben Affleck. He looks like a leading man but he's not a leading man. He makes you feel uneasy. He's good in quite a lot of things. Remember that terrible shtick Chris Rock did on him at the Oscars "You want Tom Cruise but you get Jude Law. Who the fuck is Jude Law?" etc. You'd never get Jude Law if you wanted Tom Cruise. I mean, I'm going to say, I've seen a fair bit of Chris Rock stuff that doesn't hit. that rings too false to care about.

Jude Law sings Tu Vuò Fà L'Americano in The Talented Mr Ripley. It's a good scene, Matt Damon's Ripley mesmerised by Dickie Greenleaf's knowing, but oblivious, charisma. Was that film underrated at the time? It's really good. The cast is so good I forgot Gwyneth Paltrow, who was actually the biggest, and most acclaimed, star of all of them at the time, was in it.

Damon, Law, Paltrow, P S Hoffman, Blanchett. And Jack Davenport. An air of languorous, exquisite horror.

But anyway, that's not got much to do with Yolanda B Cool and D Cup in the summer of 2010 - to me, the Number 1s in 2010 seem mostly quite bad, not all bnd, but there were an awful lot of one-week wonders. Most memorable? Bad Romance, Pass Out, Dynamite, Only Girl in the World. 

It was the year the Tories came to power. Cameron and Clegg, Dread. There was the South African World Cup that summer, I went to New York, Latitude, went to Burgundy, some other things, none of which involved We No Speak Americano.