The ANNOTICO Report
Joe Dolce's "Shaddap You Face", was a 1980 megahit that
sold 4 million
copies and topped the charts in Australia, the UK and
11 other countries.
It remains Australia's highest selling single.
Versions of "Shaddap You Face" have been recorded
by a remarkable 37
acts, in 15 different languages (including three in Spanish,
two in German,
two in French and an Icelandic version)
The success of this pop ditty only served to egg on Dolce,
who three years
later, recorded "You Toucha My Car I Breaka You Face"
:)
"Shaddap You Face" when far beyond being entertaining;
it summed up the
change in Australia when Multiculturalism displaced the
derogatory label
'New Australian', when people from southern Europe were
roundly derided as
"wogs" and "dagoes". And they weren't terms of affection.
Amazingly and difficult to believe, since May, the European
mobile phone
company Connex has been blanketing Romanian television
and radio with ads
for its slick new 3G mobile service, using "Shaddap You
Face" in a catchy
little jingle !!! ???? ###
The Age
Australia
By Clay Lucas
July 24, 2005
This month marks 25 years since North Carlton musician
Joe Dolce recorded
Shaddap You Face. Was it just a catchy song or a serious
contribution to
multicultural Australia?
What'sa matta you, hey!
Gotta no respect, whatta you think you do,
Why you looka so sad? It's-a not so bad, it's-a nice-a
place,
Ah, shaddap you face!
Since May, European mobile phone company Connex has been
blanketing
Romanian television and radio with ads for its slick
new 3G mobile service.
And what catchy little jingle has the phone company employed
to flog its
wares? For reasons perhaps best understood by Romanian
marketers, it is
using Joe Dolce's Shaddap You Face, the 1980 megahit
that sold 4 million
copies and topped the charts in Australia, the UK and
11 other countries.
It remains Australia's highest selling single.
Many Australians would recall Dolce's song as even more
teeth-grindingly
irritating than the tune it replaced as Australia's best
selling single —
singer and ad man Mike Brady's "Up There Cazaly".
But is there more to 'Shaddap You Face' than an annoying
pop ditty that
only served to egg on Dolce, three years later, to record
"You Toucha My
Car I Breaka You Face"
Shirley Strachan, the late Skyhooks front man, didn't
think so when in 1981
he told Dolce he pitied him because his only hit was
a novelty song.
"It wasn't a hit. It was a phenomenon," Dolce remembers
telling Strachan.
"Better to have one phenomenon than 10 piddly little
hits."
When Dolce's song came out in 1980, it was an instant
singalong classic.
But at least one music critic thought it was the phenomenon
Dolce had
described.
"Shaddap You Face summed up the change in Australia when
multiculturalism
displaced the derogatory label 'New Australian', when
colourful Immigration
Minister Al Grassby regularly graced the national stage,
and SBS was about
to take to the air," music journalist Craig Mathieson
wrote in a 2001
attack on the Australian Performing Rights Association.
The association's
list of the 10 best Australian songs of the past 75 years
did not include
Dolce's. And as cheesy as Shaddap You Face was, Mathieson
argued in an
opinion piece for The Age, it was too important to Australian
pop history
to leave out.
"It's not a perverse critical gambit to suggest including
(in that list)
what your memory probably places as a novelty song of
the late 1970s,"
wrote Mathieson. "It caught a social current, and gave
voice to it in about
three minutes."
Everything a good pop song should be. And perhaps the
reason Dolce so
staunchly defends Shaddap You Face as a great folk track.
Versions of the song have been recorded by a remarkable
37 acts, in 15
different languages (including three in Spanish, two
in German, two in
French and an Icelandic version). Proof, Dolce says,
that it bridges
cultures.
And it has been covered in many different genres, from
early British dance
outfit EMF to US rapper KRS-One. "No one called it a
novelty song when he
covered it," quips 58-year-old Dolce from his North Carlton
home.
If you look past the original recording's ham-Italian
accent and limp
comedic mandolins, the song speaks of a migrant teenager's
battle with his
domineering mother, of the new society the family had
found itself in, and
the struggle of their working-class life.
"People snigger at Shaddap You Face, but it still earns
us a lot of money,
even today," says Mike Brady, who released the song on
his record label
Full Moon Records (established with earnings from Up
There Cazaly).
Brady also believes the song played a part in the emergence
of new
attitudes to multiculturalism. "Ethnic Australians finally
felt comfortable
enough to laugh at themselves."
Many others, of course, just saw it as a chance to laugh at migrants.
Dolce himself believes his song was the start of a rising
tide of tolerance
in Australia — that ethnic minorities could finally be
accepted, and that
humour was a way to shimmy them through the door of acceptance,
rather than
a dour-faced political correctness. His song is as unlikely
a place as any
to pick up the rich vein of ethnic humour that ran through
20th century
Australia. It began with John O'Grady's 1957 book They're
A Weird Mob
(written under the pseudonym Nino Culotta), and continued
through Wogs Out
of Work and Mary Coustas' Effie, to present-day comedians
Fat Pizza, Hung
Le and Tahir Bilgic.
Dolce himself is an interesting study in multiculturalism.
Born in Ohio to
an Italian-American family, he came to Australia in 1978
with his
Australian first wife, after almost a decade trying to
forge a career in
the American music scene.
What he found in Melbourne horrified him.
"Back home, to be an Italian entertainer was something
to be proud of. In
America, Frank Sinatra was the benchmark," says Dolce.
Here, there was barely a mark. There were no Italian entertainers,
and
people from southern Europe were roundly derided as "wogs"
and "dagoes".
And they weren't terms of affection.
"In those days, the word wog was like the word c---,"
says Dolce. "If you
said it, you said it low."
He first performed Shaddap You Face at a talent night
in 1979 at the
long-gone Marijuana House in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy.
He had recently visited his childhood home in Ohio, and
heard phrases his
Calabrian and Sicilian grandparents had muttered to him
as a child: "What's
the matter you?" and "Eh, shaddap". He incorporated them
into a song about
Italians in Australia, and played the song as the character
Giuseppe.
"At the end of the night, I'd sing Shaddap You Face, pass
the hat around,
and make about $20," says Dolce.
Though it was comedy, Dolce also used the performance to confront racism.
"Giuseppe would get audiences to talk about their idea
of a 'wog'. At
first, everyone would be silent and embarrassed. Then,
with a bit of
coaxing, they would eventually start pulling out these
foul, repugnant
terms for a 'wog'." After a while, everyone would pick
up the absurdity of
what Dolce was doing and laugh at themselves. "It was
kind of like group
therapy."
ON JULY 3, 1980, Dolce rented one of Mike Brady's studios
and recorded the
song. He took it to Mushroom and Festival Records, who
laughed him out of
the building. He took it back to Brady. By November,
it was atop the
Australian charts.
By the end of 1980, even Elton John had recognised Shaddap
You Face's
selling power. John had heard the song while touring
here, and had his
manager approach Dolce with the idea of buying the rights
for the UK market.
After Dolce knocked them back, John's group immediately
contracted Andrew
Sachs (Manuel from Fawlty Towers) to cover the track,
perhaps in the hope
the Australian's lack of knowledge of the European market
would allow them
to release a slightly altered version (Manuel was to
be from a Spanish
family).
But Dolce was no bumpkin from the boondocks: an immediate
injunction with a
British court stopped the release of Sachs' version,
and a judgement in
Dolce's favour forced the recall of all copies of that
version.
But the song stands as evidence of multicultural Australia's
new-found
ability to laugh at its own ethnic stereotypes, says
Dolce. "Australians
laugh at Crocodile Dundee," he says. "Barry Humphries
magnifies Australian
characters. Italians make fun of their characters in
the same way."
Once the humour is accepted, so is the minority group,
says Dolce. "If you
can't really laugh about something, it's still marginalised."
He cites the Koran as a contemporary example. "You can't
make jokes about
it because you'll be killed. You can't mess with Allah."
Today, much of Dolce's time is taken up writing new material
and performing
a stage show called Difficult Women with partner Lin
Van Hek.
If ever he sings Shaddap You Face it's in an Aboriginal
dialect. In the
song, he tells the story of a Dreamtime teenager being
scolded by his
mother. "Noone recognises what I'm doing when I perform
it till a few
minutes through, because I'm starting off on the basis
that, because it's
an Aboriginal song, it's a serious song."
Milestones
Name: Joe Dolce
Age 57
Lives North Carlton
Born Painesville, Ohio
Famous for Shaddap You Face, which sold 350,000 copies
in Australia,
knocking off 1979's Up There Cazaly as Australia's best-ever
selling
single. Cazaly had only recently overtaken Slim Dusty's
Pub With No Beer.
First Australian single 1978, Boat People, a protest tune
about Australia's
shabby treatment of Vietnamese refugees. The song flopped.
Last recording 2003, One Iraqi Child, a protest song about war in Iraq.
Website joedolce.net.au
http://www.theage.com.au/news/
music/whatsa-matter-you-hey/
2005/07/23/1121539192279.html
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