Dynamo’s underdogs sent BAK to the pound
09.05.2012 18.00
Hey, dig
I know how it feels to be expect to get a fair shake
But they won’t let you forget
That you’re the underdog and you’ve got to be twice as good
(Yeah, yeah)
In the early to mid 1960s, San Francisco exploded into a self-aggrandizing orgy of mutually pious backslapping that resembled a trust fund-funded, multicoloured version of the final scene to ‘Society’, where all the aliens got down with each other and shagged themselves into a gelatinous mess all over the posh carpets of middle America. The Velvet Underground in their black polo necks and wraparound shades were right to sneer at this whole ghastly west coast wet dream because, and let’s not beat about the bush here, Country Joe and the Fish or the Grateful Dead really could just fuck right off.
But the scene created two geniuses. Janis Joplin, who really didn’t know any better (poor Janis), and Sly Stone, whose opening track to his debut album with the Family Stone was a masterpiece called ‘Underdog’.
None of this really matters, apart from shoehorning the great man into a review of a game of football that is jaw-dropping in its own lack of self-awareness and whose pretensions are as sky high as Chris Waddle’s penalty on that night in Turin. But… and this is a big but, there is an argument that in ‘Underdog’, Sly was getting at the crux of a problem that the fans of BFC Dynamo, with all the baggage that they have to schlep around with through their lives like a cartoon bum on the streets, know all too well- especially in their dealings with the team they faced on Wednesday in the BFV Pokal semi-final, the upwardly mobile BAK 07. read full article
