On Ebay
On Ebay is a 2004 song by the British band Chumbawamba .
Shortly before the US troops marched into Iraq in the course of the Third Gulf War , pressure from an influential lobby in the USA eased the regulations on the importation of archaeological artifacts from the Bush administration . Professor McGuire Gibson from the University of Chicago , among others, criticized this approach early on and predicted that after the war in Iraq, many Iraqi artifacts would certainly be found on the eBay auction house . Gibson's forecast came true shortly after the end of the fighting, which included the looting of the National Museum in Baghdad . For two days, looters were able to steal the museum's treasures and destroy everything that was not transportable. The US armed forces, unlike the Iraqi oil ministry, did not protect the building.
After hearing about it, the band Chumbawamba , which had long taken on socially critical issues, wrote a song on the subject and released it on their 2004 album Un . The buyability of culture, the American ignorance of the thousand-year-old culture of Mesopotamia and the western consumer society as a whole are criticized . The song begins with a report on the museum looting. The band draws parallels to the confiscation of works of art in the so-called " Third Reich " under the pretext of " degenerate art ", for which the Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka is symbolically addressed as a person affected:
"Mr Kokoschka, it just happened again
They struck the museum like a hurricane
Haul them on a coach the next day and it's gone"
"Mr. Kokoschka, it happened again
you hit the museum like a hurricane
dragged it onto a wagon and the next day everything was gone"
The second stanza first addresses the large-scale robbery of antiquity, which is compared to the destruction of the city of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War , one of the first large-scale destruction during acts of war. Finally, it addresses the small sums for which human heritage has been destroyed:
“And all Baghdad there dusting off the antiques
It's the 14th Guernica we've had this week
I got $ 25 for a Persian vase”
"The antiquities are disappearing all over Baghdad
It's the 14th Guernica we had this week.
I got $ 25 for a Persian vase"
In the third stanza, as in the refrain , the allusion to the Tower of Babel in ancient Babylon is alluded to , which, according to the Bible, led to great linguistic confusion and misunderstanding among people. The allusion in the refrain from Babylon back to Babylon (from Babylon back to Babylon) takes on the fact that the city of Babylon is actually on the territory of today's Iraq. In contrast to the associated language confusion, people are now finding a common language again, that of money:
"They're building a tower out of wrappers and cans
Now we're speaking a language that we all understand"
"You are building a tower out of packaging and cans.
Now we speak a language that we all understand"
The refrain is a criticism of the capitalist commercial society, which allows such excesses in the first place, and a special criticism of a modern form of this ownership and buying mentality, exemplified by the Internet department store eBay.
“That stuff inside your houses
And that stuff behind your eyes
Well it all ends up as stuff that you can buy…
On eBay
From Babylon back to Babylon”
"The stuff in your houses
and the stuff behind your eyes
Everything ends up with you as stuff that can be bought
On eBay
From Babylon back to Babylon"
The song was not released as a single, but released as a single edition for the radio.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ News from the British agitpop combo at laut.de.
- ↑ Jan Ole Jöhnk: Unfair trade - Chumbawamba: On Ebay. (No longer available online.) In: Fluter . November 1, 2005, archived from the original on March 24, 2014 ; accessed on March 24, 2014 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ New 'Un' Studio album released April 26th on Mutt Records ( memento of the original from November 3, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
