Who Censored Amanda Palmer?

I think I have one of those gay "diva crush" thingies on Amanda Palmer. I mean, I always thought I was immune to that shit. I don't feel particularly friendly toward Dorothy. All those pop/disco/torch song songstresses, from Kylie and Madonna on back? Fuck, they're part of the reason I always hated the gay scene. I just don't get the whole... "hagfag" malarky. Sure, I recognise the awesomeness of icons like Dietrich and Bacall, but it doesn't make me squee over them in that butterfly-to-a-candle way. But Palmer is a woman after my own heart. The Dresden Dolls and, as I blathered about last October, catching the Glasgow gig on her solo tour was one of the musical highlights of the year. I'm more jealous of Neil Gaiman for the fact that he hangs out with her than for any of his literary successes.

So what brings on this confession of irrational ardour? Well, via Cheryl Morgan I found out that she's become the victim of a particularly pernicious form of panty-waist priggishness, that sort of censorship that's not so much born of strident moralistic fuckwittery as it is of craven cowardice, the censorship of those spineless squirming worms of so-called humanity who're just too chickenshit to stand their ground against their own fear of the possibility of causing a shitstorm. What it is, you see, is that a whole bunch of British radio stations are too much in a tizzy over the potential adverse reaction to her latest single, "Oasis", to risk giving it airplay. So screw the fuckers. Here's the YouTube version of this bitingly bitterly blackly humourous song with its savage satirical point that only cretins and curs would fail to get:



Palmer has a great blog entry on the whole affair actually. Go read it. It's an impassioned defence of the right of the artist to make this sort of work. I couldn't agree more with what she says. Fuck, it's the sort of thing I've probably written five thousand word blog entries on at some point or another. And to round it all off, she sums up with that three-word phrase that is my own personal mantra: fuck that shit. I mean, Christ, that phrase is so written into my core identity, it'll probably be my fucking epitaph. If I was going to blather on exhaustively in defence of satire, the freedom of comedy to tackle any subject, it's pretty much a stone cold certainty I'd end on exactly those words.

So, yeah. Now I have a proper gay "diva crush". Shit, and with all that talk of musicals in the last post too. God, I'm going to have to head down to the Village and hand myself over for resocialisation by the Homonormativity Committee, like the faggot Number Six I like to think I am just throwing in the towel. Yes, I am a disco number. No, I am not a free man.

Bollocks.