The Calgary Flames are a professional hockey team. They’re also destroying themselves, and music, and Canada. The Calgary Flames are cursed in these profound ways despite how cute their outfits were in 1987:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9eF6DVI0tk
Bask in that song. It’s a hot tip from “JayZeke” on the Discord, and it’s the curse I fixate on today. “Red Hot” is a music video by the second-coolest hockey team in Alberta. The Calgary Flames self-describe as RED HOT. Spoiler: they achieve no heat 99% of the time, punctuated by one glorious five-alarm fire:
Wow: you are now ovulating. Why? Lanny McDonald. That’s his majestic face. When you’re a lifelong learner like I am, you get to discover there are guys with the complete unabridged first name “Lanny” on their birth certificate. You also get to discover a mustache almost as red as a Calgary Flames hockey sweater. Lanny McDonald is like if Tom Selleck got bitten by a radioactive berserker. Plus, Canadian. I’m convinced he is perfection in human form. Real fact: when the NHL invented a new trophy to honor leadership slash humanitarianism, Lanny McDonald was its first winner. Coincidence? Yes – and also, let’s say no. Let’s say that trophy was conceived to honor Lanny McDonald’s barrier-shattering levels of goodness. It’s the Lanny McDonald Trophy For Lannism. Also, let’s look at Lanny hoisting the Stanley Cup.
The NHL used to whip ass. We used to be a proper (pair of) countries. Back then, this guy from small-town Alberta spent his final season captaining an Alberta team to a Stanley Cup championship. That is Correct Hockey Stuff. Then Lanny skated off into the Canadian sunset, after hoisting said Cup as gracefully as he makes love. He probably even made love to the Cup itself, in a good way, without feeling any heteronormative need to rename it “Stanleyetta”. Is today’s NHL like that? Hell no. We’re suffering back-to-back Miami Florida hockey championships, won by careless rubes who broke the damn trophy. Therefore the present day stinks and the past was perfect. Wait: hang on. I almost forgot about the horrible Calgary Flames music video for “Red Hot”.
To many, this video’s curse is not obvious. “Ha ha”, they think. “Hockey players pushing a trumpet’s valves without any relationship to the audio.” But look below the surface. The Calgary Flames produced this in 1987, for VHS tapes, for charity. Imagine how little good that did compared to the petroleum-seeking apocalypse necessary to produce hundreds of entire tapes holding one pop song. Furthermore, consider the cultural context of 1987. As everyone knows, and feels, because they share my exact background, the entire second half of the 1980s belonged to a Chicago Bears team that won one Super Bowl and made one iconic music video.
Less than two years before “Red Hot” wasted Canadian tar sands, the Bears (a football team) made a novelty single about their unstoppable ability to win the Super Bowl. Then they danced to it while wearing sunglasses and holding instruments. Because the Eighties were a carnival of poor planning, the Bears did not release “The Super Bowl Shuffle” after winning a Super Bowl. They released it several weeks before that. They released it when they had won zero Super Bowls in their entire history. And they filmed it within a day of losing a football game. The Bears made the most ridiculous guarantee in the history of American sports, and somehow followed through. It’s one of Chicagoland’s most cherished events. I was born years later, and I still have peers who talk it up. So with all due respect to Saint Lanny McDonald, how dare Calgary steal my homeland’s culture. If you make a corny music video where your athletes wink about being unstoppable, and you do it in the year 2 A.S. (Anno Superbowlshuffle), you’re guaranteeing a championship that season. Those are the rules. And if you fail, you’re dishonoring Mike Ditka even more than he proceeded to, very often, dammit Mike read a book. Anyway Calgary failed. The Flames didn’t win the ensuing Stanley Cup. More on that later. For now let’s immerse ourselves in Calgary Flamecore hockey-pop. The “Red Hot” video opens with a few hockey highlights. This is a foolish choice because the next shot has to compete with the legit excitement of hockey. The next shot can’t compete. The next shot is adult hockey players doing what’s essentially a middle school band concert.
“Red Hot” is a pop song, sung by one guy, backed by drums and a lot of electronic instruments. Naturally, the Calgary Flames put that one voice in as many of their athletes’ mouths as possible. The Flames also pantomime playing trumpets (terribly) and trombones (they do move the slide each time there’s a big new note). I hope I’m not bringing up Chicago stuff too much, but the Calgary Flames have more redundant horn players than friggin’ Chicago. If you showed this footage to an alien, they would think it was taped in the lifetime of John Philip Sousa. It’s like if A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court was about an entire ’80s band sustaining a hockey concussion that sent them to the 1880s.
Anyway: shout-out to the guy pictured above. He’s tooting real hard. I would too. Being a hockey player seems awful. Being a hockey player in a performing arts situation seems even worse. You’re a twenty-something Manitoba farmboy, or a Eastern Bloc-defectin’ goon, or some other salt-of-the-meathead. Then, a Calgary Flames hospitality staffer hands you a euphonium. Nobody contains enough multitudes to handle that normally. They’re either gonna go ham like Toots McSlapshot up there, or do the opposite extreme and lapse into “minimal participation in a church hymn” mode.
That guy hated doing this video, and the editor stuck him in anyway. Also, the passage of time stuck all these guys with an extra cartoon quality. They have 1980s Canadian hockey hair. Ha! Hilarious in a dated way. Also, they wear matching jeans and matching white polo shirts with a matching tiny team crest. Ha! Hilarious in a timeless way. No matter how much a few celebrities try to bring that hockey hair trend back, no one will ever revive this matching clothing. Even our current fascists don’t 100% match their polos AND their pants. These Calgary Flames did. They are trapped in the amber of their own dorkdom. Also, wow, one of them is Brett Hull.
The future Hall Of Famer and son of another Hall Of Famer BRETT FREAKING HULL sings the third lyric in this song. He sings it as if his jaw wants to fight his upper palate. Upsetting mouth stuff. Why? Perhaps Brett read the full lyrics. Let’s enjoy those lyrics, shall we?
What a mess. I admit one visual element helps jazz it up. There’s no reason for this guy to turn 135º to deliver that last lyric to one of the stage’s wings. It’s also wonderful that he gets harder to hear as his face moves toward us and his mic stays close to his mouth. I assume he’s wearing ice skates on land. His bodily pivot must’ve slashed a cable.
Why does he do that pivot? I don’t care. I just know these dorks benefit from that kind of chaos. Also, how dare this lyricist steal three cultures’ achievements. Their ripoff Super Flames Shuffle opens with a confident claim about going to the moon (USA) and climbing Mount Everest (Nepal and New Zealand). You did not do those things first, Canada! This stolen valor must be punished. Go sit in the corner and look at Calgary’s boring horizon until you’re ready to apologize.
The chorus’s lyrics aren’t better. They sing that you can’t touch a flame when it’s red hot. You can, of course. It hurts. Also if you do it in a cool enough way you’ll do that matchstick trick from Lawrence Of Arabia. Canadians probably don’t know that’s possible because they think the hot lands of Lawrence Of Arabia are as fictional as Dune. Anyway: flames equal hot, is the message. Did you know Calgary acquired the Flames hockey franchise from Atlanta Georgia? Thanks to “EnglishHurler” on the Discord, I’ve learned the Atlanta Flames picked that name in honor of General William “Tecumseh” Sherman burning half that Confederate state down. That rules. That’s the perfect opposite of [gestures at every Southern statue]. Anyway not enough people came to the Atlanta Flame-Games and the team moved to Calgary. This shifted the meaning of the Flames team name to “there is oil here and oil is flammable.” At least the Utah Jazz achieved comedy. The Calgary Flames did nothing but erase Union Army heroics.
Further verses strain the limits of these hockey guys’ cognition. Six of them form a rock tableau of “two keyboardists loomed over by four handclappists”:
They mouth almost all the words as they do this. The final lyric of their section is the word “you”. I know what you’re wondering, My Dear Hotdogger. You wonder if one of them says the word “you” with a gesture to the camera. Great news: he does so, with visible effort written all over his face.
Next, there’s a shot where they probably let a concussed hockey player run the camera. It starts with this composition:
Keep squinting. You are correct. That’s one guy singing, a second guy bobbing side to side and smiling too much… and then a sliver of a third head cresting the edge of the first head. Their heads are like the Sun and Moon at 99% eclipse totality. It’s so jarring. If a cool filmmaker framed that, we’d call them the next Kubrick. Instead, a freelance camcorder monkey from a Prairie Province framed that. Cinema history they did not make. Then their performers pushed this sequence into sublime new territory:
Hell yeah. They’ve invented a novel form of Head Move → Other Head Reveal. Surprise: I showed that to you earlier. Remember the guy mouthing the lyrics with no enthusiasm? He did that because another guy moved his head to use the microphone. Then he realized his face was visible. Then he sang along, but not a lot. Finally, an even more thrilling artistic choice occurred. An editor used that take in the final music video. Give that man the obscure humiliating Canadian version of a local technical Emmy. Then give him another one of those awards for the next shot. The camera pans across a guitar homage to Busby Berkeley. Several professional hockey players dip guitars up and down in unison. They’re swing dance dipping their guitar necks. It’s the hockey stick faceoff routine, using the stick-ish guitar part. Then another guy takes the microphone OUT OF ITS STAND!!!!! to sing too hard. Then in the next shot that too-intense Flame does more trombonist mouth-violence.
There is so much more music video to go. Why? There are so many more Calgary Flame faces to feature. This next Flame’s eyes look so far to the side of the camera, I can mentally model the cue card.
He’s followed by the next guy’s pained rictus. That guy’s followed by another guy’s face doing sensual lyric-humping.
Then the next guy’s face creeped me out for no good reason. Something’s off. Fun music history factoid: the cover of Devo’s seminal 1978 album Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! is a real portrait of a golfer, plus alienating facial smoothing. This guy looks like if somebody did that alienating smoothing to the real David Byrne.
Obviously that’s his regular face. Right? Obviously it is not possible to hyper-gloss the face of a Calgary Flames hockey player using rented 1980s A/V gear or amateur Albertan prosthetics. Obviously. Right? Obviously. Still, I doublechecked, because I’ve all the way lost my mind at this stage of repeat listens to a Calgary Flamestune. Update: it is not possible. That’s the regular face of a guy. His name is Hakan Loob. Hakan Loob. Hakan Loob! That name is the unfair oral sex joke you never knew you needed. Turns out Sweden is an endless font of new guys with names like a long-neck prequel Jedi. These sorts of real-life wonders about the world make me want to stand up and clap, quickly yet limply, in the exact style of a Calgary Flames player in the last shots of “Red Hot”.
Back to the overarching curse: the Calgary Flames made a “Super Bowl Shuffle” song/video, then proceeded to get swept out of the second round of the playoffs by the Edmonton Oilers. “Red Hot” didn’t even make the Calgary Flames the best hockey team within Alberta. These Flames also brought loser energy to making the video. It filmed after a first-round playoff loss to the Winnipeg Jets. That Jets franchise was such a mess they moved to Arizona within a decade, yet still less messy than the Flames. Put those failures together with “Red Hot”, and you’ve got all the ingredients of an ironclad sports team curse. In any functional cosmos, “Red Hot” dooms the Calgary Flames franchise to eternal mediocrity. They had shallow roots, zero championships, and a track record of performing doormat services for the other NHL teams in the part of Canada that’s sort of Texas. Then the Flames insulted the gods by defaulting on a hubristic synth pop championship guarantee. We’ve all read a Greek myth. That’s a one-way ticket to ironic underworld punishments.
We all agree on what I just said, right? The Calgary Flames doomed themselves to a total and complete sports curse. It was impossible for them to ever win a Stanley Cup after their 1987 “Red Hot” video and failed 1987-1988 season. We agree, yes?
Good. I’m glad we agree. However, Lanny McDonald captained the Flames to their first Stanley Cup championship one season later. They doomed themselves in 1987-1988, then won it all in 1988-1989.
That cannot be. The universe does not work that way. You don’t inflict a maximum sports curse on yourselves and then resolve it within a year. There can only be one explanation for overcoming such a cosmic debt. In order to win one (and only one) Stanley Cup, the Calgary Flames invoked demonic or eldritch forces of equal or greater power. They made a deal with Satan or Cthulhu or whoever. They’re the Calgary Fausts.
What did this deal entail? First of all, I’m sure Lanny McDonald didn’t know. Lanny is as innocent as our thoughts about him are impure. Lanny’s ironic innocence only enhanced the pleasure of whichever Lord Of Darkness transacted this vile bargain. That hateful Prince Of Lies sat on his hellish throne, which burned (thematic!) with fiery (on theme!) flames (like the team name “Flames”). And then he smirked. He smirked about the pact the Calgary Flames talked themselves into. In exchange for one championship, the Calgary Flames vowed to make the worst music in sports history for all eternity. Instead of knowing the blessed escape of death, or contraction, or relocation back to someplace warm, the Atlangary Flames scuffle along making worse and worse fight songs. You must listen to 1989’s “Paint The Town Red.”
Making this cruddy song is the opposite of celebrating a championship. You’re supposed to lift Mike Ditka on your shoulders, not kneel on all fours because The Devil Himself wants an ottoman.
The Anti-Hits keep coming. Here’s 2009’s “Flames Face”. Here’s 2017’s “Till Your Luck Runs Out”. Yes of course it is a cover of a song by One Republic. Here’s 2017’s “Fire On The Sweater”. Yes of course there were two entire fight songs for a Flames team that won zero playoff games.
I lied. There were three songs for that team. 2017’s “Burn It Up” is a rap anthem about the 2016-2017 Calgary Flames. Nothing says “trap music” like a Calgary-based hockey team giving up at least three goals in every one of their playoff games against the Anaheim Ducks.
I lied. There is more than one local rap tribute to the 2016-2017 Calgary Flames. “RED MILE” describes the street where Calgary Flames fans would celebrate if something good happened. The Flames have won a total of 1 playoff series in the past entire decade.
Why are Calgarians doing this? Why can’t Calgarites put down their guitars and drum machines? When will Calgylonians stop tormenting themselves? If I’m right, the answer is “never.” The pact is sealed. Their fate is certain. Also, no team in Canada’s won a Stanley Cup in 32 seasons and counting, despite 7 of the current 32 teams representing that country. Also, a team officially representing The Devil has won 3 championships in that same era. We all see what’s happening here, yes? No team is an island. Especially Calgary. It’s landlocked as hell. So I can only assume the “Red Hot” curse reversal pact stained its entire nation’s hockey hopes. All of Canada suffers for Calgary’s sins. And the solution is clear. I’m off to Chicago. I’m building a time machine. And I’m assembling the 1985 Bears for one last job. Its code name? “The Stanley Cup Shuffle.”
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Jaber Al-Eidan, our own red hot hero who just realized that sucker punch was filmed in vancouver meaning that 3/4 of this weeks articles have ties to Canada. How deep does this conspiracy go? 1900HOTDOG more like 1900ALLDRESSEDCHIPSANDPOUTINE