Johnny Horton: "Sink the Bismark"

April 11, 1960 (1 week)

(Rolls eyes) Okay, let's get this over with. What? It's not that bad you say? Not great but definitely better than the giant pile of suck Johnny Horton did ten months earlier? All right, my hopes aren't high but at least I managed to fish them out of the sewer. They've brown gunk and an old condom hanging off of them but they remain hopes and it's not like I can be even more disappointed this time. Let's give it a listen.

(first listen)

Well, I didn't have the overwhelming urge to turn it the hell off or throw my iPad out the window after just a few seconds so that's something. I even managed to get through it and my nerves weren't shot. It's rather sad that's the best I can say for it but okay fine, "The Battle of New Orleans" didn't even have that going for it. I think I might even give it another spin!

(second listen)

Well, we're only two plays in and it hasn't quite grown on me but I'm not fed up with it either. I can almost imagine boys called Brian, Dennis, Gerrit and Sheldon all over North America liking "Sink the Bismark" so much that that they'd be happily marching around the family rumpus room in formation. It's impossible to picture "The Battle of New Orleans" triggering the imaginations of a generation of Baby Boom boys but I can see it here. Hopefully, it didn't lead any of them spiraling towards careers in the military that then led to them becoming creepy survivalists hording weapons in the Rocky Mountains. Those pro-war anthems do funny things to gentlemen of a certain age. Or so I hear.

(third listen)

So, I when I was in junior high school in Canada, my favourite teacher was Mr Harker. His Language Arts classes were great because of the freedom he gave us. His lectures weren't long (and were usually interesting, even if I never understood why he made such a fuss over Shelley's "Ozymandias"), he let us read whatever we wanted and we had seemingly full creative control over what we could hand in for writing assignments. At one point I began submitting the lyrics to songs which typically impressed him — until the day I handed in some verse about Canadians and Australians fighting in the war which he had no use for. He had nothing good to say about it which was jarring until it hit me later that day that fourteen year old boys have no business writing ballads about soldiers set to a military march. I had far more productive things to be getting on with like dealing with all my angst and fantasizing about Winnie Cooper.

(one more listen)

I still don't hate it but I'm done at this point. I will say that I appreciate Horton ditching the pro-American jingoism of "The Battle of New Orleans" and following it up with a much more Allies-friendly tune which tells you just how important those foreign markets were already becoming. They had the UK, Australia and New Zealand (and possibly Canada, though I very much doubt it) had to get an altered, less anti-British version of "...New Orleans" but there was no need to do something similar here. Johnny Horton is going to be coming up at least one more time in this space and in just a few weeks. If history is anything to go by, it'll embrace the NATO members in general, with an olive branch offered to the likes of France, West Germany, Italy and even Japan. Assuming Horton has years of country-flavoured military hits ahead of him, he'll be uniting with the entire world around a message of love and peace. He has seven years to become a full-fledged hippie and I think he can do it!

Score: 4