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Underground > Radio & Music >

Songs with incongrous references in them.

All Acting Regiment

16:31 / 03.03.08

This is an odd thread, but the other night I was thinking about how you expect there to be a reference to the character Severin from the novel Les Liaissons Dangereuse in a Velvet Underground song (it's in Venus in Furs) or at least it fits within the VU's, I suppose, 'lexical field'.

What about, though, when a band, musician or X performer of any kind mentions something you don't expect them to talk about - especially if it's in a cheery way that undercuts the incongruity? What examples are there?

The annoying thing is, I thought of loads but then fell asleep. Fire away while I try and remember them.

ONLY NICE THINGS

18:07 / 03.03.08

Severin is the main character in the book Venus in Furs, dude.

09:11 / 04.03.08

I always thought it was great how in the remix of Mariah Carey's 'We Belong Together', Jadakiss has this line about how 'sometimes we argue/I spazz out, grab my Balzac', when you wouldn't really expect him to be that into 19th century French realist authors.

10:04 / 04.03.08

You don't really expect 80s UK fast chat MC Papa Levi to start going on about Kenny Everett in his track "Mi God, Mi King", but he does:

"Sweetest singer a Sugar Minott
Maddest comedian is Kenny Everett"

11:59 / 04.03.08

@Jackie Susann

He´s grabbing his bozak, not balzac. A bozak is a DJ mixer.
"Many references to Bozak (often spelled Bozack) can be found in modern hip hop music song titles and lyrics where the word can stand for the Bozak DJ mixer as well as for ability and virility"

According to the urban dictionary, it can also be something completely different..

All Acting Regiment

13:03 / 04.03.08

@ Haus: Oh. I knew that ViF was a book, but I didn't know the chap in it was called Severin. Well, I'm still cool!

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

14:59 / 04.03.08

Nick Cave's sudden espousal of Radio 4 on Grinderman's Love Bomb gets me every time- "I've been listening to Woman's Hour, I've been listening to Gardeners' Question Time..."

18:07 / 04.03.08

From Bros' 'When Will I Be Famous', the line 'well, you read Karl Marx and you taught yourself to dance' always seemed pretty incongruous.

18:57 / 04.03.08

Probably nothing was stranger than the time Alanis referenced Charles Dickens in 'All I Really Want':

"I'm like Estella
I like to reel it in and then spit it out
I'm frustrated by your apathy
And I am frightened by the corrupted ways of this land
If only I could meet the Maker."

Well, other than the time Dickens inadvertently referenced Alanis in 'A Tale of Two Cities':

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were broke but we were happy, we were poor but we were kind, we were short but we were healthy, yeah, we were high but we were grounded, we were sane but we were overwhelmed we were lost but we were hopeful, baby. What it all came down to was that everything was gonna be fine fine fine. We had one hand in our pockets. And the other one was giving a high five."

+ PJ Harvey's "A Perfect Day Elise" is totally referencing J.D Salinger's short story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish"

19:28 / 04.03.08

Haus: Oh. I knew that ViF was a book, but I didn't know the chap in it was called Severin. Well, I'm still cool!

Of course you are! But there are degrees to these things, you know?

I'd abase myself before Joe Stretch as due penance, if I were you. Because he would have known.

You sodding weekender.

19:44 / 04.03.08

"Oh cripes!"

Etc.

All Acting Regiment

12:28 / 05.03.08

No, eh, quiet, yeah? I'm a really cool person, right?

Really cool!

ONLY NICE THINGS

12:44 / 05.03.08

Bernice Bobs her Hair, by the Divine Comedy? Although there's a limit to how incongruous a literary reference can be from the Divine Comedy. Likewise "The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure", in which a romantic shoots FdS for suggesting that the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary - that the Magnetic Fields should reference Saussure is not all that surprising, but rhyming him with Holland-Dosier-Holland, I think, probably is.

13:15 / 05.03.08

Funny, I was just thinking of "Reno Dakota, I'm no Nino Rota, I don't know the score...."

Which isn't exactly literary, but is an odd thing to pop up in a song. (The same song rhymes "feeling blue" with "Pantone 292," which is indeed a shade of blue.)

at the scarwash

17:37 / 05.03.08

I've always felt that the densely packed references to both Geraldine Ferarro and Ella Fitzgerald in Wu Tang's "Clan in Da Front" were perplexing:

I gamed Ella, the bitch caught a Fitz like Gerald --
-- ine Ferraro, who's full of sorrow
Cuz the ho didn't win but the sun will still come out tomorrow

17:55 / 06.03.08

I also like Jay-Z's 'star like Ringo' in Crazy in Love.

00:39 / 07.03.08

Mm. I've written elsewhere about the wonderful rhyming of "Pagliacci" and "Liberace" in the Chordettes' "Mr. Sandman." Both references are pretty out-there—did women ever really have crushes on Liberace?—and it only slightly spoils the effect that the songwriters seem to think that "Pagliacci" is the name of the guy, rather than the title of the opera...

Oh, and in "The Carnival is Over" (originally by the Seekers) the reference to Pierrot and Columbine always throws me. Given the song's origins as a Russian folk melody and its subtext (the lovers are separated because the boy is going off to war—although I'm not sure if I read that somewhere or just dreamed it up), it seems odd for it to allude to commedia dell'arte, and it takes me out of the song every time, no matter how sexily Nick Cave rolls his r's.