Lock the Taskbar

By Shamus Posted Monday Mar 16, 2009

Filed under: Movies 27 comments

Man, The Clash were way ahead of their time.


Link (YouTube)

 


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27 thoughts on “Lock the Taskbar

  1. Volatar says:

    I will be the first to say:

    I don’t get it :(

  2. Terran says:

    “I will be the first to say:

    I don't get it :(”

    Lock= Rock
    the= the
    Taskbar= Casbah

    The Clash wrote “Rock the Casbah”. It’s an awesometacular song from an awesometacular band. Hope that clears things up.

  3. Donald says:

    Yeah, every time I play with my taskbar all I can hear in my head is

    Lock the Taskbar!
    Lock the Taskbar!

    (search on youtube for “rock the casbah” if you don’t get it)

  4. Telas says:

    Very cute.

    Useless Personal Anecdote: The original video was filmed here in Austin, TX. One of my co-workers attended UT back then, and was having a beer on the front of his frat house when a Cadillac rolled past, with a sheik, a rabbi, and a camera crew in it.

    His buddy even asked, “Is this some kind of joke?”

    That evening, while standing in line outside the Clash concert, they saw the sheik, rabbi, and camera crew again, but didn’t make the connection until much later.

  5. The Stranger says:

    This is truly uncanny – I made this last week. Not that I thought I was the first to think of this, or anything.

    http://tinyurl.com/ajr74f

  6. Julian says:

    The shareef must LOVE this.
    @4 (Telas): That’s amazing. Strange that they filmed it in the States, being an English band and all that.

  7. nilus says:

    Strange I always thought Duran Duran sang Rock the Casbah.

  8. LintMan says:

    That was just awesome.

    @Julian – IIRC, the Clash video features some oil rigs at some point, so it was probably easier to find them in Texas than in England.

  9. Great. Thanks Telas.

    Now I’m going to spend the next 15 minutes watching this Clash video over and over again, trying to pick out Austin landmarks in the background.

    Leslee

  10. Amstrad says:

    Yet again the internet hivemind strikes and reveals that that really crazy thing I do isn’t really all that unique.

  11. gahazakul says:

    I love misheard lyrics, your ears can be confused by your eyes reading something. My favorite has always been

    http://cornonthekabob.ytmnd.com/

  12. Wil K. says:

    @ LintMan: I’m pretty sure there are quite a few oil rigs in the North Sea. Maybe they were touring in the U.S. or something?

  13. LintMan says:

    @Wil K: yes, but the rigs in the North Sea probably wouldn’t conjure up any Middle-East/desert imagery, which might have been what they were going for. Though looking at the video now, it’s hard to say if that’s what they had in mind.

  14. GeneralBob says:

    Watched it twice without sound before realizing what was going on.

    For every song by Nightwish there are three with misheard lyrics

  15. Coffee says:

    The rigs in the North Sea are, well, in the North Sea.

    As in, they’re in the middle of the ocean.

  16. Nihil says:

    Ouch. I remember how I felt like the biggest dork in the world when I first sang it in my head so many years ago. I guess there’s always someone dorkier than you who goes and puts up online what you just kept as a shameful whim.

    By the way, Youtube must have made the cosmic designers of the English language sorely regret that time they said: “Oh, let’s not be uptight, they should be able to pronounce words pretty much any way they want to”.

  17. Presumably they used Texan oil rigs since they’re out in the desert and the song’s alluding to resisting oppression (of music, no less!) in the Middle East.

    As opposed to, say, resisting oppression in the middle of the ocean.

  18. Lanthanide says:

    Prepare to ROFLCOPTOR.

    I’m not kidding:

    http://dustfilms.com/literalvideos

    Literal music videos. The songs have been re-done with new lyrics being sung to the action that is happening on screen.

    Ex: Billy Idol, White Wedding
    “Wow! Now I’ll tap my foot in, leeatther paantttsss”

  19. Bizarre says:

    Doesn’t work for me, unfortunately. “Casbah” and “taskbar” don’t sound the same the way I speak.

  20. Groboclown says:

    I just spent a few minutes trying to identify the Austin landmarks. Unfortunately, Austin has changed so much since this was filmed, that it’s hard to recognize anything from the 80s.

    Pretty much the only scene where you can see the real city was outside the concert hall, and that’s been so paved over in the last 20 years it doesn’t look anything like it anymore.

  21. DaveMc says:

    I hate to spoil a joke by asking for it to be explained, and I do get the similarity in the phrases “Lock the Taskbar” and “Rock the Casbah”, but . . . as someone who doesn’t use Windows very much, I don’t understand the underlying reasons for locking the taskbar. Is this something that comes up a lot in Windows-land? Clearly there’s something about the Taskbar that bothers people, and it can be fixed by locking it . . .

    (Also: Dustfilms’ literal videos are hilarious!)

  22. Tizzy says:

    @Bizarre: True enough, “Casbah” and “Taskbar” don’t sound the same, but “Rock the Casbah” is infamous precisely because the mangled pronunciation of Casbah, and what people have been interpreting it to mean.

    As for why the video was filmed in TX, it must be because they wanted to have an armadillo in their videos because dillos are cool…

    On another note, if you like ABBA and programming, there is always “Gimme a manual after midnight (to make those bugs go away)”…

  23. Lee says:

    It’s been years since I was able to look at the taskbar right-click context menu without thinking of this song.

    @DaveMC: The taskbar can be dragged to different edges of the screen, or made taller so it takes up multiple rows. The amount of space available for shortcuts on the Quick Launch section can also be resized. Locking the taskbar prevents you from accidentally making these adjustments.

  24. Namfoodle says:

    There’s a Rush song called “Fly by Night”.

    In that song, there is a lyric that goes “ship is a commin'”

    I had a friend in high school who was a big Rush fan. I had another friend who insisted that the actual lyrics were “Chicken Mcnuggets” (it’s the same number of syllables).

    Blows were exchanged on more than one occasion.

  25. Bizarre says:

    @Tizzy: I meant even more so, in my case. I’m Australian – taskbar is “tarskbar.”

  26. Jonny Dade says:

    I’ve argued many times over the Kasabian lyrics to ‘processed beats’ (i think) were he says ‘the troops are on fire’ – i’m convinced he says ‘the CHIPS are on fire’ oh well i’m probably wrong. It was me dad who spotted the rock the kasbah / lock the taskbar thing a few years ago. I got bored today and googled it only to find out many others have spotted it. well done. Serioussly i can’t beleive some losers don’t get it, – there isn’t much to get, pretty basic really!

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