2 June 2005
Ireland of the ’70s and ’80s, where you had to wait weeks or even months to get a landline installed in your home. A far-flung island where a cargo cult deifies a crate of rotary handsets washed up from a shipwreck. (The latter isn’t so fanciful: a real-life indigenous tribe in a remote part of Vanuatu worshipped royal arch-racist Prince Philip as a god.) These are circumstances where I could understand phone ringtones being so exotic and fetishised as to go to number one in the singles chart. Why did the good people of 2005 go buck-wild for downloadable ringtones? Perhaps it was the novelty. Why did they put this ringtone marketing collateral to number one? Also perhaps the novelty. Remember: a number one is a measure of quantity, not quality, and more a signifier of pop culture than pop music.
Notionally, Crazy Frog’s chart-topper is a cover of a previous Irish number one, Harold Faltermeyer’s synth theme from Beverly Hills Cop. So, you get a cheap, clattery Euro-techno version of ‘Axel F’, a video that rides high on the banter of Crazy Frog being annoying, and surprisingly few snatches of the actual ringtone that for many people was the soundtrack to 2005. This is best understood as novelty tie-in merchandise, much like ‘Do The Bartman’ or those Dustin singles that Dublin folk love. On a related point, you may have spotted that I covered up Crazy Frog’s, ahem, froghood on the CD image above. The thing is, in nature, male frogs don’t have penises. Why that explicit anthropomorphic extension was deemed essential to the Crazy Frog brand in the first place was never quite explained to us.
Not that I ever want to listen to Crazy Frog’s ‘Axel F’ again, but I really was less irritated by this than I had expected. I suspect the real annoyance in 2005 wasn’t Crazy Frog but those bantz-merchants who thought it was gas crack to play their gimmicky ringtone ad infinitum, at maximum volume, and let on someone actually cared enough to call them.
