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Gay Bar (song)

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"Gay Bar"
Song

"Gay Bar" is a song written and performed by the Detroit-based rock band Electric Six. It was the second single off their debut album, Fire released in 2003.

While both the song and music video received significant airplay, various lyrics mentioning war were edited due to their possibly offensive nature since the song made its air debut at the start of the Iraq War. It is considered by many to be band's most well-known song.

Music video

The music video, directed by Tom Kuntz and Mike Maguire, was recorded in April 2003 at a movie studio in Toronto, Canada. The video depicts a series of Abraham Lincoln ('Gaybraham') look-alikes in the White House, portrayed primarily by the band's lead singer Dick Valentine, but stand-ins were used for some scenes.[1]

Track listing

CD

  1. "Gay Bar"
  2. "Don't Be Afraid of the Robot"
  3. "Take Off Your Clothes"

DVD

  1. "Gay Bar" video
  2. "Gay Bar (Peaches remix)"
  3. "Rock Show"

7"

  1. "Gay Bar"
  2. "The Living End"

Trivia

  • According to singer Dick Valentine, the idea for the song came up from incorrectly hearing the lyrics of DEVO's "Girl U Want" as "just a girl, just a girl at a gay bar" while the song was playing in a very loud nightclub.

Censorship

In the clean version of the song, the words nuclear and war (in the line "let's start a war, start a nuclear war") are cut out and a whip lash sound is used instead.

A Japanese radio version exists in which the same lyrics are replaced with "let's do an edit, do a radio edit".

Covers

Canadian electronic musician Peaches covered the song as a bonus track for her album Fatherfucker.[2]

Parody video

The song was used in a parody video shortly after the beginning of the Iraq War. The video is a mash up of clips featuring George W. Bush and Tony Blair, edited to look like they are apparently singing the song to each other by cutting the clips at different points so their mouths match up. The original video was distributed on many forums and imageboards as a flash file, and it had become a viral video long before the advent of YouTube, where it has been uploaded several times. The original uploads have been removed due to copyright claims from the band, with one remaining version having more than 450,000 hits.

Charts

Chart (2003) Peak
position
UK Singles Chart[3] 5

References

  1. ^ http://www.electricsix.com/music.php#gay
  2. ^ http://www.discogs.com/Peaches-Fatherfucker/release/623004 Retrieved 2010-05-11.
  3. ^ http://www.chartstats.com/songinfo.php?id=30913 Retrieved 2010-05-11.
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