England 2 Colombia 0

CBC Music (which I follow on the Tweety) recently featured a best-and-worst-World-Cup-songs-ever roundup. I was entertained and pleased to see Ricky Martin finally get some credit for something musical--in this case, "Copa de la Vida," his World Cup hit from 1998. I'm going with the Spanish-language version, because (1) "cup of life" sounds goofy in English and (2) "Copa de la vida" was the first version I heard. Oye, it's a San Antonio thing.

No, for reals about Ricky Martin. I mean, "She Bangs" and "Livin' la vida loca" were ridiculous, but gah, I even miss '90s music these days, when there was a chance you might hear a song on the radio (at least in San Antonio) that didn't sound like it came out of a sterilized facility in an industrial park somewhere deep in the San Fernando Valley.

*Heavy sigh.*

But I digress . . .

While I was pleased to see some musical love for a post-out Ricky, I was nonetheless slightly perturbed that CBC Music didn't include my all-time favorite World Cup song in its best-of list. And that would "England 2 Colombia 0" by the late, fantastic Kirsty MacColl.

OK, so it's not a true, official World Cup song. Regardless, it is far more entertaining, celebratory (of life, of survival), and poignant than anything J-Lo and Pitbull could manage in a thousand years of trying--which, plainly stated, still wouldn't be up to the output created by a hundred monkeys locked in a room with a drum machine and Autotune.

Sorry, just a little bitter this morning. Kirsty was taken from her family and from us much too soon. Her own output was sporadic due to record company problems throughout her career, but I had followed her from sometime in the '80s when I used to hear her songs on the radio in Washington. I also probably had some glancing knowledge that she was the creator of the pop classic, "They Don't Know," made famous in the U.S. by Tracey Ullman, during the second British Invasion, late '70s-early '80s edition. And who could forget a song title like, "There's a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He's Elvis"? Well, I probably did forget about it until recently. But it's a rockabilly charmer worth recalling now.

So I am sad that Kirsty is no longer gracing us with her wonderful, whimsical, poignant songs, but I am also happy that if she had to go so soon, she went out on a very high note with the Latin-inflected Tropical Brainstorm album.



Here's another one from the LP, "In These Shoes?," which may or may not be the first song I heard from this album and one that still makes me laugh and groove. I am pretty sure I bought this record when I was still living in San Antonio, although I don't remember how or when I heard about it. Nevertheless, I pull it out every now and again and give it a spin and regularly use tracks from it on mixtapes I make for friends.

And now, through the miracle of the Internet, I'm doing the same for you.