| "Lonely Swedish (The Bum Bum Song)" | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Single by Tom Green | ||||
| Released | 1999 | |||
| Format | CD single | |||
| Recorded | 1999 | |||
| Genre | Comedy | |||
| Writer(s) | Tom Green | |||
| Producer | Tom Green | |||
| Tom Green singles chronology | ||||
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"Lonely Swedish (The Bum Bum Song)" is a novelty 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 free of charge 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 toilet humor, joking about various places the singer's rear end finds itself, such as on a step, on cheese, a railing, bubblegum, a dog, a telephone, a man, or on a battleship. A sample of the lyrics are as follows:
The song came about when Green did a bit on a cruise ship, where he wandered the decks bothering people. Following an altercation with a ship employee, he 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 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 turned to address the audience: "Well... I got lucky."
Rapper Eminem referenced Green's antics 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:
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 section of the "The Real Slim Shady" that mentions Green was played over the end credits in Green's film: Freddy Got Fingered.
The song's promotional video was a great success on Total Request Live. It was retired the day it reached number one on the countdown, and after just five total days on the show. Green stated that the reason for retiring the video was that "it's not fair to 98 Degrees." Later, in his autobiography Hollywood Causes Cancer, 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 already been pre-taped on-location, and the producers of the show were completely unaware of the song at the time.
MP3.com in conjunction with tomgreen.com ran a remix competition where several remixes of "The Bum Bum Song" were profiled on Tom Green's website, promising the winner (who was to be chosen by total number of downloads and song plays) a flight to New York to see a taping of The Tom Green Show. However, the contest was mooted when MP3.com changed formats/owners and Tom Green's popularity waned.