Schapelle Corby – “Palm Trees”
Sweet Jesus, Schapelle Corby Has a Song Now
Words are failing me here. Big time.
Rating: -1/11
Setting herself alongside Aussie cultural touchstones ranging from lukewarm goonbags to people who use the expression “Fuck me dead!” while talking to their infant children, national cautionary tale Schapelle Corby has once again returned to the limelight. Much like that time you borrowed a pair of flip flops from a mate and now have a lifelong case of blistering tinea all over your lower body, Corby has proven a grossly persistent irritant on the Australian psyche. Regardless of how you feel about her guilt or innocence, it’s startling how much fame has been foisted upon a woman who once took weed to, like, the one place you don’t take weed to.
After years of headlines and a gloriously redundant television movie, Corby has decided our unwarranted devotion to her every movement are no longer enough. Having now spent the requisite amount of time in jail to spontaneously develop a music career, Corby has made it her business to infiltrate your sense of wellbeing, to render your once-promising New Year a slovenly, splintered heap of futility. She’s made a fucking song. It’s called “Palm Trees”. And I’m sorry that you know that now.
There’s not a lot to be said about it as a piece of music, much as there’s not a lot to be said of a mound of puppy corpses as a wedding cake. It mistakes the very purpose and function of music entirely, only mimicking the technical appearance of it in vulgar gestures, like someone using a dead person as a ventriloquist doll. Morbid, you say? Fuck you, have you heard this thing?! From the watered-down, movie-theatre sodapop squelch of the beat, to Corby’s bizarre attempt to sing through her own rectum, to whatever the fuck this Nat Z. person thinks she’s doing dropping ’80s rap cornballs like “Schapelle is her name, and she’s got something to say”.
Not to mention, what the fuck is up with that cover art? It looks like the sort of collage Corby might have made in the prison workshop but, like, there’s something devastating about it. I can’t decide if it’s threatening or just so maddeningly amateurish that it’s created a rift in my brain where the discernment button used to be. All I know now is that I once stuck a soy sauce-sopped chopstick through my eardrum as a kid, and I felt the saddest pining for that blissful sensation when listening to this woe-begotten, arse-stick of a “song”.
[Sigh] Happy New Year, I guess.