Lonely Swedish (The Bum Bum Song)
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"The Bum Bum Song (“Lonely Swedish”)" is a song by Canadian comedian Tom Green, created in 1999 for The Tom Green Show. When the show moved to MTV, Green released it as a single, encouraging visitors to download the song from his website, burn it onto CDs and distribute it to friends. The music video was filmed in Seattle, Washington, home of the Swedish Medical Center, from which the name of the song is derived.
This song is pure, nonsensical potty humor, joking about various places the singer's "bum" finds itself, such as on a step, on cheese, or on a battleship. A sample of the lyrics:
- My bum is on the gum
- My bum is on the gum
- I can blow a bubble with my bum bum bum
The song came about when Green did a bit on a cruise ship, where he wandered the decks bothering people. During an altercation with a ship employee, Green began rubbing his bottom against a rail, singing, "My bum is on the rail, my bum is on the rail..." The incident inspired Green to compose the full song.
After Green's testicular cancer treatment, his MTV special about the disease began with a clip from The Bum Bum Song video: "My bum is on the cheese, my bum is on the cheese, If I get lucky, I'll get a disease!" The clip ended, and Green then addressed the audience: "Well... I got lucky."
Rapper Eminem referenced Green and this song in his own song "The Real Slim Shady", making a point about what material MTV censors would allow in the network's own productions while editing similarly offensive material out of performing artists' music videos:
- Sometimes I just wanna get on TV and let loose
- But can't, but it's cool for Tom Green to hump a dead moose
- "My bum is on your lips
- My bum is on your lips
- And if I'm lucky you might just give it a little kiss"
- And that's the message that we deliver to little kids
Green has frequently said that hearing The Bum Bum Song referenced in an Eminem song was one of the more surreal and amusing aspects of his own, very sudden fame.
The song's promotional video was supposedly a great success on Total Request Live, immediately retired after it reached number 1. Later, in his autobiography, he revealed that MTV had pressured him to do so in order to maintain the image that Total Request Live was in-fact a live request show (the next week's episodes had been pre-taped on-location, and the producers of the show were completely unaware of "The Bum Bum Song" at the time). The music video was controversial for the nudity involving a flatulence-driven bubblegum bubble.
