How 'Walk The Dinosaur' By Was Not Was Anticipated The 9/11 Attacks On AmericaBoom boom, acka-lacka lacka boom!
The unmistakeable sound of conflict, of bombs raining down on the Middle East, gunfire in Afghanistan, apost-September 11th world, policed not by the UN or the police, but by a bunch of Texans in leather chapslassoing dictators before their golf weekends. But those who gave us this song of prescience, who wrote thatunforgettable line; boom boom acka-lacka boom boom, weren't even recognised protest singers. This wasn'tthe work of Bob Dylan, George Michael or Paddy out of Prefab Sprout. Instead Walk The Dinosaur came tous composed and arranged by Don Was and his group of talented cohorts who weren't Don Was, operatingunder the collective name Was Not Was. At the time Don didn't know he was writing a horrendouslyaccurate prediction of nightmares to come, in fact he didn't even seem to have a grasp of basic grammar.This lack of conscious foresight can clearly be seen in the video for his track, undercutting the horror at itscore by choosing to stress the more Cretaceous aspects of the lyric, a kind of Spielbergian Fraggle Rockwherein Was and his sharp-suited band cavort rhythmically amongst a group of lovelies clad only inmammoth fur bikinis, displaying some of the firmest cleavage since Sabrina. Needless to say the clip had ahuge influence on teenage males watching Top Of The Pops at the time, not least myself.Yet it was not until the aftermath of the Trade Centre attacks and the subsequent toppling of the Taliban regime, a regime which did not endorse furry bikinis in any way, that the true import of this seemingly throwaway 1988 pop song bubbled to the surface. Open the door, get on the floor - Everybody walk the dinosaur. These words, repeated mantra-like throughout each chorus, seem uncanny now in their Nostradamus-like augury. Why else would an American "get on the floor" if not to escape some unspecified but deadly threat? And whatever the fear, be it powder in the mail, poisoned Starbucks or John Grisham researching his latest legal potboiler by attending your trial proceedings, the alarm sparks a paranoia, necessitating cowers under a desk, or perhaps in the boot of a Range Rover.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves Cynthia. The plotline of this remarkable song begins in it's first verse, on a night like this forty million years ago. Here Was depicts a time before bigamist prophets, a time when the Koran was but a shadow on the brainpan of beings evolving into neanderthal man. After setting the era Was blasts us with unnerving and horrifying images; the sun spitting fire, a monkey skull, the sky as blue as ice. But then, in a moment of pure songwriting genius, Don turns the scene on its head, reminding us why today's misguided youth see him as an eighties throwback as he intones I felt a little tired, so I watched Miami Vice. A useless delve into the realms of dated pop culture perhaps, but it helped raise the single into the UK top 10 and got Was Not Was onto one of the Now compilations, one hell of an achievement for such a controversial track.
The second verse uncovers the romantic sub-plot, a staple of every good disaster movie and here a priapic distraction, our protagonist switching his attention to a pastime important in times of international uncertainty; getting busy with a hot chick. Still stuck somewhere between the early neolithic period and the late eighties, our hero spots an arty peacenik type painting the CND logo on the walls of her cave. She gets his blood up but, being a modern guy, our man can't just whack this fine piece of ass and drag her to his lair for a night of primitive lovin'. No, first he must debase himself for the benefit of the watching feminist contingent, offering himself up as her slave. It works a treat and before they end this night by throwing shapes beneath the stars the pair eat a snake, I'm not sure why. Perhaps our hero wasn't unreconstructed enough to kill anything bigger. Then he cradles the chick as she sleeps, their bellies full of rattler, and we fast forward up to the present day to watch the passing cars.
Here the listener enters an idyllic vision of family life before the storm hits. Of course Was knows the dinosaurs were to be wiped out, eventually this human and his ilk would inherit the earth. But what horrors were to come after that? Don understands, whether he knows it or not, that these times will be terrible. This songwriter has lived through many disastrous eras, both musical and otherwise. And so the mid-song break prepares us, depicting a dreamlike world where even the unimaginable can happen, a place all-too familar to us in 2003 and irrevocably changed. One night I dreamt of New York - You and I roasting blue pork - In the Statue of Liberty's torch. Here is one final image of safety when all around is moving from fantasy to nightmare. Elvis' beard and some lepers are name-checked in the strange hyperreality of this dreamland before we arrive at our final verse and the ultimate showcase of those Was Not Was precognitive powers.
A shadow from the sky much too big to be a bird
A screaming crashing noise louder than I've ever heard
It looked like two big silver trees that somehow learned to soar
Well, phew! Pardon me for a moment while I mop my forehead with the first soiled shirt that comes to hand. We've just learnt how our wussy protagonist has been transported to NYC, and now this shape hits, two towers collapse, the scene is one of terrible destruction, and it is painted in words as vivid as any news reporter's. Anyone who lives in New York, witnessed the footage, bought the subsequent documentary on DVD or heard about it from someone who did and won't shut up, will recall all this in hideous technicolour. It was the biggest, loudest, most apocalyptic, sound ever, and now America is awakened from it's slumbers, both in the song and reality. The mighty lion's roar of Co-lin Powell is audible to all as the US changes its foreign policy and starts invading obscure countries again. That which was predicted in the funky rhythms of this Saurian-themed pop song comes to pass, all of us living in dark days when child protestors run loose in Westminster and a web-site like this is allowed to flourish.
But what of this heavy, metaphorical, and heavily metaphorical, bloody great beastie? The one which dominatesthis song's title and chorus? Could it represent George W. Bush, a dinosaur powered by the military-industrialcomplex he chooses to restrain or unleash with such terrifying ferocity? Maybe the Diplodocus of the Don Wassubconscious is symbolic of the monster inside every man, a carnivore which hankers for war, inspiring futureadolescents to renew their hatreds with each subsequent generation. Or was it an actual dinosaur? Perhaps aplesiosaur or whatever they're called, rising out of Loch Ness to make a nuisance of itself and knock my collectionof china pigs off their shelf with its tail. No, I think none of these. This dinosaur is Bin Laden, Saddam Hussain, that bloke who rode out of Afghanistan on a motorbike, three leaders of an axis of evil and the hardline cleric who spent a fortune on cosmetic surgery to make himself look like a pirate. All of these superluddites hanker for a time before our first-world progression toward capitalist accrual, a way out of the West's proliferation of dumb movies, over-processed food, women wearing hardly any clothes and Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway. Well, I say those anachronisms will never defeat our civilization. Osama will have to prise my Ashley Judd posters out of these cold dead hands! And Don Was too knows that evil must never prevail. By the final, interminable, repetition of his chorus we've moved from walking the dinosaur to obliterating it with smart-bombs and missiles. Everybody kill the dinosaur indeed! That'll show despots everywhere. Change or die non-Christians! Learn to accept Shania Twain into your life, renounce your judgmental ways and pay your fit Arab womenfolk a steady wage to dance around poles before a male audience. Once you've acclimatised to our ways and become members of Blockbuster there'll.be no need to concern ourselves with your emancipation, for you are liberated already! They say history is always written by the winners, but it wasn't so at the start of the twenty first century. 9/11 was already predicted then, if only we'd known it. Events etched onto vinyl and cassette thirteen years before by Don Was and those members of his band who weren't Don Was. Praise be to him, God is great.
