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There's a Folk Implosion song I like called "Nothing Gonna Stop," recorded in 1996 or so. The lyrics, aside from the chorus, are pretty much nonsensical, but a phrase or two jumps out at you: Seagreen serenade... something something velvet cave... something something dancing god... confusion would be you and I... All very postmodern and cryptic, I figured.
Flash forward to this week: I've become interested in the Silver Apples, a weird proto-electronica duo from the 1960s, and I'm doing some research, downloading some songs. And I see titles like Seagreen Serenade, Velvet Cave, Dancing Gods, Confusion, You and I...
And I slap a hand against my forehead like I'm in a cartoon. Lou Barlow from Folk Implosion must be a Silver Apples fan: the lyrics to "Nothing Gonna Stop" are still nonsense, but they're a recognizable form of nonsense—a cut-up. And I've found the key.
Another story: The Pogues track "Turkish Song of the Damned" is a neat little three-minute ghost story, an Ancient Mariner-type tale about a shipwreck survivor who's visited by the ghosts of his dead crewmates, who are intent on dragging him off to Hell. The song climaxes with an instrumental coda, a breakneck jig that slams the song to a close but apparently leaves our poor protagonist to his fate.
Years after I first hear that Pogues record, I'm listening to a set of Irish fiddle tunes and I hear a melody I recognize. It's the tune from the end of "Turkish Song." Now, all those tunes have names, and they're often oddly evocative: what's this one called?
Why, it's "The Lark in the Morning."
And suddenly "Turkish Song" changes utterly. This ghost story now has a fairy-tale ending: as the shades of doom surround him, our protagonist hears from outside the window the call of the lark, signaling the dawn—and the specters fade away, like Count Orlock at the end of Nosferatu. And our protagonist presumably runs off to church to seek absolution and thereby save his soul, but we'll leave that for the moment...
Has some bit of knowledge gained after the fact ever caused you to re-evaluate a song with new understanding? Similarly, have you ever listened to somebody else's totally off-base take on a particular song, where hir misinterpretation depended entirely on some fact that you knew that s/he didn't? I've got a couple of howlers from Nick Hornby and Greil Marcus... |
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