"
Blame Canada" is a song from the film
South Park:
Bigger, Longer & Uncut (by
Trey
Parker &
Marc Shaiman).
In the
song, the fictional parents of South
Park, led by Sheila
Broflovski, decide to blame Canada
for the
trouble their children have been getting into since watching the
Canadian-made fictional movie Terrance and Phillip: Asses of
Fire and imitating what they saw and heard in the
movie. The parents refuse to accept that by not preventing
their children from watching Terrance and Phillip in the first
place, they are themselves to blame for their children's
misbehavior (on the obvious grounds that they do not want to look
like bad parents). Thus the South Park film satirizes
scapegoating, and the reactions the
creators of
South Park expected to receive from the very
movie the song was featured in.
Blame Canada is also the title of a book about
South
Park written by Dr.
Toni
Johnson-Woods, who is an Australian academic and expert in
contemporary
popular culture. In it,
South Park is examined as a modern popular culture icon and
described as
carnivalesque within the
theoretical framework of
Mikhail
Bakhtin.
Reception
The song was
nominated for the
Academy Award for Best
Song (1999). This created controversy, because all nominated
songs are traditionally performed during the Oscar broadcast, but
the song contained the word "
fuck", which the
FCC prohibits
using in prime time broadcasts. Comedian
Robin Williams performed the song with a
chorus who gasped when the word was to be sung
(Williams turned around at the crucial moment, and did not actually
sing it). He included digs at
Margaret
Trudeau and
Bryan Adams (a famous
Canadian singer of three Oscar nominated songs), partially taken
from lyrics of
Sheila Broflovski's
reprise of the song in "
La Resistance". He
referenced
Celine Dion as well.
Mary Kay Bergman, the voice actress who
sang the female parts in the song, committed suicide months before
the performance, forcing the organizers to search for a replacement
for her and
Trey Parker, who did the
male voices. Williams introduced the song by speaking with
duct tape over his mouth so that his speech
resembled that of
Kenny McCormick,
then tearing it off and finally saying
Stan
Marsh's trademark line, "
Oh my
god! They killed Kenny!"
There was also some concern about the fact the song referred to
well-known Canadian singer
Anne Murray
as a "bitch", but Murray indicated that she was not offended by the
tongue-in-cheek lyric (Murray was even invited to sing the song
herself on the Oscar telecast, but had to decline due to a prior
commitment). When asked, the Canadian
Consul General (and former
Prime Minister)
Kim
Campbell noted that she was not offended by the song since it
was clearly a silly satirical piece not intended to insult her
country. This is made clear in the final line of the song:
We must blame them and cause a fuss
Before somebody thinks of blaming us!
Coincidentally, the Canadian Oscar telecast in which Robin Williams
sang the song included the premiere of the famous "
I Am Canadian" rant advertisement, which
counters many perceived Canadian stereotypes.
References
Bibliography
See also
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