Cache

May 19th – Consider the following: - 

“Louie Louie, oh no, Me gotta go Aye-yi-yi-yi

Fine little girl waits for me

Catch a ship across the sea

Sail that ship about, all alone 

Never know when I come home.

Louie Louie, oh no, Me gotta go…”

Probably worth a visit from the Bad English Police but probable cause for an FBI investigation? And governments wonder why its citizens have a conspiracy theory mentality.

What’s so annoying about this sort of national security crap is that, while they’re doing this they aren't actually concentrating on the things that really matter. Things like catching people who smuggle baked beans past the toast police; folk who tease chickens with tales of pheasant-puckers’ mates or, heavens-to-Betsy, evil crooks who ruffle the fur of Pekingese puppies the wrong way, and we all know what happens then; their eyeballs pop out and you have to wrap them in greaseproof paper and take them to the Chinese-eyes-ease who put them back in gently, that’s what.

Those lines above are a truncated version of the Kingsmen’s Louie Louie and, on this day in 1965, these lyrics were investigated by the FBI as subversive material…I kid you not.

The song is about a guy going back home to Jamaica, possibly, to see his girl that he’s not seen for a long time. The girl could be his wife, fiancée or daughter; all is not made clear given the remit of the three-minute pop song. What is made clear is the level of paranoia in the US government at the time…and probably still is now. Such was the thrall that rock ‘n’ roll was held in back then and I thought;

‘With all their collective intelligence, surely they had something to go on?’

 So I thought I’d try and understand their take on it, to see if I could decipher the hidden message.

Louie Louie – a reference to the boxer, Joe Louis, the so-called Brown Bomber and the upsurge of anti-apartheid activism in the deep south?

oh no, Me gotta go – a reference to the poor, mainly black quarters of various states complaining about the lack of sanitation?

Aye-yi-yi-yi – ditto above?

Fine little girl waits for me – a reference to white, sexist subjugation so prevalent in some of the more backwoods areas?

Catch a ship across the sea – a reference to the slave ships?

Sail that ship about, all alone – a reference to the scourge of Somali piracy to come…and the use of voodoo to see that far into the future?

Never know when I come home – a reference to the keeping of late hours by people who should really have been locked up at dusk?

Louie Louie, oh no, Me gotta go… – repeat as necessary.

So, there you have it; proof, if indeed proof were needed, of the dastardly plot being laid by Johnny Foreigner to overthrow the legally elected government of the USA…no wonder they sent in the lyric police.