“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” said Hector Urquhart in his introduction to Popular Tales of the West Highlands (1860). Was he talking a load of rubbish? Well, his words actually pertained to fairy eggs – floating seashore objects – and also stories themselves, seen as dubious by some, and magical by others. But the phrase could easily have come from the extremely eccentric man who lives down my street. He resembles Ben Gunn from Treasure Island, his ragged trousers hanging off his backside. He regularly wheels a creaking old bicycle that pulls a trolley, and almost every day fetches and fills his house with unwanted old fridges, washing machines, and a host of hoarded bric-a-brac. Rumour has it he’s got a double-first from Oxford, and perhaps writes poetry of genius. Or perhaps not. Perhaps he’s a ragged trousered philanthropist.
But meanwhile, what’s that sound? It’s the Readers Recommend lorry making loud warning beeps as it lowers a giant skip. And it is that skip in which you are invited throw any old iron, or indeed irony, but mainly fill up with songs about trash, rubbish or garbage. But what is this stuff? As we have already established, that’s subjective. Are there any brilliant songs about recycling? Possibly not, but there are many about things we might want to throw away, and hopefully not just to landfill. So this may refer to actual objects, but also things people say – trash talk, cutting the crap, or quite simply, bullshit. White trash? Perhaps you might want to bring this into the mix - and what demographic it might refer to. Then again trash might be negative emotions, situations, or simply “feeling rubbish”, or other connotations of these words. But to get one definition of the range, let’s go to an expert in the field, Oscar from Sesame Street.
My childhood is certainly littered with rubbish references, which is probably how I got to do this. The Wombles featured quite heavily – with a mission to pick up the rubbish that “folks leave behind” on Wimbledon Common, and “make them into something new”. Early recycling pioneers, surely? Yet while they are described as “small and clean”, in some ways they rather ironically resembled giant fat rats, didn’t they? Certainly if you played in the band, it was a sweaty gig in that furry suit, as this rather less authentic later music video must have surely been.
From the busy and tidy to the incredibly cool? Well, Stig of the Dump might be one choice, but his conversational skills were never up to much. So for me the greatest trash-inhabiting character is the one and only Top Cat, whose easy-living attitude and ability to talk himself out of sticky situations with tremendously brilliant rubbish, voiced by comic actor Arnold Stang, was not unlike that of slippery smart-talking Phil Silvers as Sergeant Bilko.
Trash cans, or bins, for recycling or otherwise feature heavily in our daily lives, and must certainly carry some secrets. If only they could talk. Strangely enough, some can, and have musical talents, as this video reveals:
Rubbish, however, is a serious business that all too graphically illustrates much of what is wrong with the world. Rio de Janeiro’s Gramacho landfill area has been a home to a community fo 5,000 catadores (rubbish pickers), who, living in poverty, try to survive off its contents, as revealed in more than one documentary and portrayed the 2015 feature film, Trash, from a 2010 book by Andy Mulligan. Yet meanwhile, technology also can turn trash into cash and fuel on in wealthy countries. Tragically South America is not alone with such slums of detritus. They litter the world, from India to Kenya, and China reportedly has the biggest mountains of tyres, TVs and fridges. We just can’t stop buying and discarding goods. Where will it all end?
As with many great questions, one route to the truth lies with The Simpsons. Homer Simpson discovers the dire consequences of bad rubbish disposal in the episode Trash of the Titans, but perhaps the most entertaining and prophetic depiction of landfill comes in Matt Groening’s other great work, Futurama, in the episode, A Big Piece of Garbage. Here, in a parody of the 1998 film Armageddon (who hasn’t parodied this film?), Earth in the year 3000 is threatened by the imminent arrival of an enormous asteroid which turns out to be a giant ball of rubbish humans sent out into space in the year 2052. Disaster is eventually averted, with the giant ball shot back into the stratosphere and unlikely to the return until the year 4000. Nobody seems to mind, and the main character, time-travelling Fry, remarks, cheerfully: “That’s the 20th-century spirit!” Vera Lynn’s We’ll Meet Again is played over the credits, reminding us of Stanley Kubrick’s nuclear apocalyptic black comedy, Dr Strangelove.
So then, place your rubbish songs in the container provided (that’s comments below mainly) and this week’s guru of garbage, master of muck, doctor of dregs, star of slop and raconteur of rubbish, the wondrous sonofwebcore, will sift through it all for a selection of gems published next Thursday 30 July. Your deadline? Last orders (11pm BST) this Monday 27 July. Now the treasure skip is yours …
To increase the likelihood of your nomination being considered, please:
• Tell us why it’s a worthy contender.
• Quote lyrics if helpful, but for copyright reasons no more than a third of a song’s words.
• Provide a link to the song. We prefer Muzu or YouTube, but Spotify or SoundCloud are fine.
• Listen to others people’s suggestions and add yours to a collaborative Spotify playlist.
• If you have a good theme for Readers recommend, or if you’d like to volunteer to compile a playlist from readers’ suggestions, please email peter.kimpton@theguardian.com
• There’s a wealth of data on RR, including the songs that are “zedded”, at the Marconium. It also tells you the meaning of “zedded”, “donds” and other strange words used by RR regulars.
• Many RR regulars also congregate at the ‘Spill blog.
