the blog quebecois

When Sting wrote "Message In A Bottle" he presented it to the rest of the band with a guarantee that they had a #1 hit on their hands. Inspired by this, I made the same boast for "Fashion Patrol," but the security guards threw me out before I could properly introduce myself. Security guards, I have found, are terrible judges of music.

I was fooling around with the drum machine one day, and erased (whether deliberately or accidentally I can't remember) some of the instrumentation (you could program the bass and snare drums, and the hi-hat and ride cymbals independently) from a fairly standard rock pattern and wound up with an odd, loping beat. That immediately suggested the bass riff, and the song was built out from there. The lyrics I slapped together in about five minutes for the purpose of having something to sing, with the intention of someday rewriting them -- keeping the same theme, but smoothing out the glitches and maybe adding a new verse.

So, the premise was that we were a special unit going around arresting anyone who didn't meet our lofty sartorial standards. Given our usual get-up of jeans and T-shirts, I can only conclude we were hitting the "Irony" button pretty hard; but hey, it would have been a pretty cool job. Not unlike, um, the religious police in Saudi Arabia. But with a more highly-developed sense of irony.

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[ad. lib. in]

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[Verse]

Yeah

I said this town's all locked up
And there's nowhere to go
City's shut down
We are in control

There's a new year
No appeal to reason
Bureau of Vanity predicts
Conflict in the fall season

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[Chorus]

We are the fashion patrol
Armed with rock
And ready to roll

Yeah the style police
Bringing law and order
to these messy streets [2nd chor. rpt. 2nd stanza]

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[Verse]

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[Chorus]

Check out that guy
Does he have papers?
Is he a suspect
Or a perpetrator?

And then: how about that woman?
Is her apparel illegal?
Is she a conscious delinquent
Or something more lethal?

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[ad. lib., out]

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Fashion Patrol Warning: Embedded QuickTime audio.

Alternate: Not a streaming site, but you can click on the download link; when the Windows or equivalent dialog box appears, you can elect to save it to disk, or (first choice) open up the song with the default media player, like iTunes, WinAmp, or Windows Media Player. Fashion Patrol

Previous:

Life's Embarrassing Moments
Cry Me A River
I Got A Girl
The Very Last Man On Earth
Golddigger
Hangin' In The Park
Just So You Know
Caught By Computer
Me & J.B.
By The Lake
Dirty Little Secret
Fire In The Waxworks
Warning Shots
The Chase
Just Like A Woman