Wack Wednesday: A Band Begging to Be Cancelled, Set to a Beat That Refuses to Pick a Genre
South London's Fat Dog built their new album's title track out of a John Lennon diss track and an imagined Anatolian psych band under siege from a rave beat -- all in service of a straight-faced plea to be cancelled, because cancellation sounded easier than asking for rest.
By Song Reviews · October 28, 2026
What Wack Wednesday Is
Every Wednesday, Song Reviews covers the week’s weirdest music story – AI experiments, novelty tracks, bizarre genre collisions, and the internet phenomena that don’t fit anywhere else on the calendar.
What We’re Talking About Today
Fat Dog’s second album, Cancel Me (I’m Tired), arrived October 2 on Domino, and its title track – reviewed alongside this feature, 7.0/10 – is the week’s pick: a South London seven-piece asking, in complete deadpan, to be cancelled by the public, because being cancelled sounded more achievable than simply being allowed to stop. Frontman Joe Love has said the song started as a collision between John Lennon’s 1971 diss track “How Do You Sleep?” and an imagined version of Anatolian psych revivalists Altın Gün getting steadily overtaken by a club beat – two reference points that share almost nothing, which is the point.
What’s Wack
What’s wack isn’t the premise alone – plenty of bands have joked about cancellation before. It’s the specific commitment on display: a wiry riff that could open a decades-old Turkish psych record, gradually drowned out by rave synths until the arrangement is as exhausted-sounding as the lyric; a deadpan vocal that never breaks character to signal the joke; and a music video, shot by director James Winstanley on an actual night out in Soho, documenting the band’s failed real-time attempts to get the public to actually cancel them. A seven-person band refusing, song after song, to pick a single genre turns out to be the ideal format for a song about refusing to pick a single identity worth keeping – the chaos in the arrangement is doing the same job the joke is doing in the lyric, and neither one blinks first.
Hero image: “Cancel Me (I’m Tired)” single/album cover art, Domino Recording Co. Used under fair use for editorial commentary.