Chelsea Dagger by The Fratellis, the Chicago Blackhawks goal scoring celebration song, has become a go-to cliche for Hawks fans and media alike. You’ll hear Chicago media members lacking in originality and devoid of cleverness use a sentence like “Will the Hawks put a Chelsea Dagger in the Minnesota Wild tonight?” or
“This game could be the Chelsea Dagger for the Anaheim Ducks,” in their broadcasts/articles etc.
Likewise on Blackhawks Playoffs Twitter, the excruciating banality of which has been chronicled in excruciating detail here.
“Cue Chelsea Dagger,” or something similarly trite, is what you’ll see from the social media zombies that eschew nothing but Blackhawks pablum onto their status updates and Twitter timelines this time of year.
The further the Hawks venture in the Stanley Cup Playoffs; the worse it gets. The more building blocks the Blackhawks add to their culture of excellence, the dumber Hawks fans as a whole become on social media.
But what’s Chelsea Dagger really all about?
Other than being the Hawks party tune, as well as a shill song for bad tasting, low budget beer?
There was a rumor going ’round about the original meaning of the paean.
This is my once-a-year reminder to everyone that "Chelsea Dagger" is about doing cocaine with a prostitute. #GoHawks #TheMoreYouKnow
— Jasleen Jaswal (@jasleenjaswal) June 25, 2013
If you read the replies to the Tweet, you’ll see that it’s supposedly a song about doing cocaine with a transsexual prostitute to be exact. However, The Fratellis themselves have shot that theory down. I also Tweeted at this person and she replied that she had no source to cite on this.
The song’s Wikipedia page, as much as it hurts to cite them as a source, have a story corroborated by Song Facts:
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Lead singer Jon Fratelli (real name: John Lawler), wrote this song for his wife, who worked as a burlesque dancer with the stage name Chelsea Dagger (her real name is Heather). She performed at the Glasgow venue Club Noir, which according to Guinness World Records is the largest burlesque club in the world.
Wikipedia’s source is Scotsman.com, which sounds official…ish. They did a very detailed interview profile of Heather and the song, and there’s nothing in it about prostitution, cocaine or transsexuals. It’s just the stage name of a burlesque dancer; and the dancer had the name before the song came out. Not the other way around.
“I give him trouble all the time for calling the song that, because now everyone thinks I’ve stolen the name from him,” she said in reference to Lawler, and his naming of the song.
There is plenty of vagueness within the origin of the name Chelsea Dagger however:
“I don’t really know [what inspired the name], it got decided after a few beers. Maybe I should invent something with a more exciting story, it’s not as exciting as I’d like it to be. My friends have known me as that for ages, so they find the song hilarious now.”
Ok, so maybe the meaning of Chelsea Dagger turned out to be nowhere near as interesting or as scandalous as we thought. Just like Phil Collins’ “in the air tonight” isn’t about his witnessing a murder and then confronting the man when he showed up at one of his shows. It’s really about nothing more than just being in a very deep depression.
We’re not sending you away empty-handed though.
“Oh What a Night” by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons is about losing your virginity in a 1-night stand. Also, Neil Diamond admitted in 2007 that “Sweet Caroline” was a pedophiley song about lusting after an underage Caroline Kennedy. Diamond then totally changed his tune (proverbially) about it last year.
Oh, it gets worse too. Turns out pedophile songs were actually very common in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Now all of a sudden Chelsea Dagger seems wholesome and sweet by comparison.
Paul M. Banks owns, operates and writes The Sports Bank.net, which is partnered with Fox Sports Digital. Banks, a former writer for the Washington Times, currently contributes to the Chicago Tribune RedEye edition. He also appears regularly on numerous sports talk radio stations all across the country.
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