Funny, I always liked the lyrics to that song. I kinda like Syd's Floyd era lyrics, which were very whimsical and owed as much to the British tradition of nonsense poetry as it did to psychedelia. Ditto for John Lennon's late 60's offering (e.g. Lucy In The Skies..., I Am The Walrus, etc).Originally Posted by The Dark Elf
I suppose you're not too keen on Dr Seuss either, huh?
When he was pointing himself, he probably changed the line to: You've an asshole (which he does)I think you've really got Zappa wrong here. Don't assume that he was letting himself off the hook. There is a revealing moment in the performance of "Broken Hearts Are for Assholes" captured in the Baby Snakes video, when Zappa points at random audience members while singing "You're an asshole! And you're an asshole! That's right!" Finally he points to himself and concludes "And you're an asshole!"
All joking aside, it's never occured to me that Zappa wasn't including himseld in the human zoo comedy he was criticizing.... except maybe in Joe's Garage, where he places himself as an outside observer (or maybe the victim)?
His texts were clearly satyres (though most of it is way above my head.... not that I try to understand it anymore), where nothing could be taken seriously, though the whole thing (most of it anyway) should be looked at very seriously by philosophs.
I especially can't get permeate his first MoI period and Suzy Creemcheese where the music was also just as crazy as the texts were, it's kind of turn off for me.
But I won't judge it as bad, though (FTM, it's probably brilliant, if you're an insider - which I wasn't).
I just don't get it and don't care to (anymore)
Zap was obnoxious on intent and third degree, not by accident and first degree
TBH, it's my preference too: when Frank shuts up and let his guitar and musos do the talking
Last edited by Trane; 10-12-2019 at 03:03 AM.
my music collection increased tenfolds when I switched from drug-addicts to complete nutcases.
Chapter eating Marx one morning
Freaking out on electric meat
Chewing thrills with Turkish madmen
Space speed to Sweden without sleep
Cocaine coloured computer cards
Coding cosmic zipper skies
Vitamin clouds beyond the moon
Yogurt blood lunacy shoes
Acid warped the global fetus
Like the bourgeois look at feet
And cadillacs
Two thousand years we crossed up Jesus
Thinking he'd make ends meet
Christ no
ou can't make the world to order
Like a hotel service's food
Take the sixties as a movie
Take the seventies as fuel
You've got a reason to be endless
Because your mood is summer cool
Let deliverance be existence
Before this song becomes your fool
Lyrics by Pye DuBois, music Max Webster
Yes, but it's considered bad poetry, as is anything that doesn't read like people normally speak or write.
Like a dog without a bone.
Mr. Mojo risin
and the winner:
Da west is da best.
keep it off my radio.
Morrison may have been lazy and complacent by the end of The Doors' time, but some of his earlier stuff, to my mind, is exceptional. What about this from Crystal Ship:
Before you slip into unconsciousness
I'd like to have another kiss
Another flashing chance at bliss
Another kiss, another kiss.
..People are strange when you're a stranger
Faces look ugly when you're alone
Women seem wicked when you're unwanted
Streets are uneven when you're down
Poetry, and other kinds of literature with a high register, isn't supposed to sound like people normally speak or write.
Literary English has kind of dried up and disappeared, but inversion is a feature of some of the most beautiful English there is. Shakespeare's plays and sonnets have it. Robert Frost has it. Liturgical English has it (King James Bible for instance, but not just there.)
Of course, any lyricist who thinks of themselves a poet is surely lying to themselves and inversion and rock music should stay far away from each other.
..And you read your Emily Dickinson
And I my Robert Frost
And we note our place with book markers
That measure what we've lost
Like a poem poorly written
We are verses out of rhythm
Couplets out of rhyme
In syn-co-pated time
And the dangled conversation
And the superficial sighs
Are the borders of our lives
Yes, we speak of things that matter
With words that must be said
"Can analysis be worthwhile?"
"Is the theater really dead?"
And how the room is softly faded
And I only kiss your shadow, I cannot feel your hand
You're a stranger now unto me
Lost in the dangling conversation
And the superficial sighs
In the borders of our lives
Last edited by rcarlberg; 10-12-2019 at 11:30 AM.
When the still sea conspires an armor
And her sullen and aborted
Currents breed tiny monsters
True sailing is dead!
Awkward instant
And the first animal is jettisoned
Legs furiously pumping
Their stiff green gallop
And heads bob up
Poise
Delicate
Pause
Consent
In mute nostril agony
Carefully refined
And sealed over
"The White Zone is for loading and unloading only. If you got to load or unload go to the White Zone!"
Well, if we're posting really GOOD lyrics now, these always slew me:Leave me something to remember you by,
more than a lock of your hair.
Leave me scarred for life,
show you really care.
You can do it with kindness,
keener than a knife.
Just by making yourself scarce
you can leave me scarred for life.
We walked arm in arm with madness
and every little breeze
whispered of the secret love
we had for our disease.
Leave me something so I won't forget,
more than a nick or a scratch,
to remind me that in you I met,
in you I met my match.
Nothing on the surface,
I don't want it to show.
Something I can hide inside
so only you and I will know.
You know I'd do the same for you –
leave me scarred for life.
And if we never meet again,
for all the time we spent
leave me with a tender spot,
something permanent.
Yes some good intellectual reflections there! Then looking out over the headbanging audience, Neil realized the context is important and reached out a hand.... Yeah!!
My Progressive Workshop at http://soundcloud.com/hfxx
Well I bargained with the Judge,
but that bastard wouldn't
when they caught me licking fudge
but they never told me you were a minor
KC - Easy Money live
----------------
They can't stop us,
Let 'em try!
For heavy metal
We will die!
Quit my job this morning said; forever
I would hold my head up high.
Cause I need metal in my life,
Just like an eagle needs to fly.
So I walked outside into the street,
From a hall I heard thunder and screams.
I walked inside so I could hear,
And the guy beside me gave me a beer!
Manowar - Die for Metal
--------------------------
Manowar Manowar living on the road
When we're in town speakers explode
We don't attract wimps 'cause we're too loud
Just true metal people that's Manowar's crowd
...
We like it hard, we like it fast
We got the biggest amps, man they blast
True metal people want to rock not pose
Wearin' jeans and leather, not cracker jack clothes
Manowar - Kings of Metal
-----------------
The Gods Made Heavy Metal And They Saw That It Was Good
They Said To Play It Louder Than Hell
We Promised That We Would
Manowar - The Gods Made Heavy Metal
.................
You say Mega Ultra Deluxe Special Limited Edition Extended Autographed 5-LP, 3-CD, 4-DVD, 2-BlueRay, 4-Cassette, five 8-Track, MP4 Download plus Demos, Outtakes, Booklet, T-Shirt and Guitar Pick Gold-Leafed Box Set Version like it's a bad thing...
I couldn't disagree more. Altering word order for effect - both how the words sound, as well as how they mean - is what poets have been doing for centuries.
In this case, another effect gained is the internal assonanance of money & minute, which both land on the beat. If you want to dig into this more deeply, you could also say an effect of this is to emphasise further the reduction of time to a monetised commodity.
I'm going to assume you're being ironic here, in quoting this...
These lyrics are brilliant, on any number of levels.
You could cite them as an example of dadaism in pop music. You could cite them as a performance of meta-composing. You could cite them as a performance of the way in which singers will often use place-holder language to stand in for lyrics when they're trying out a new song. You could cite them as a performance of writer's block coming into conflict with the grind of churning out product.
But most of all, they are a performance of futility - the futility of writing a song in the expectation that it might get your loved one back, that ennui that abandoned lovers feel, the pointlessness of carrying on. All of this is especially poignant when you listen to the song in the context of Caroline, which precedes it. Caroline Coad had, of course, just left Wyatt.
Hey, I resemble that remark! (as I casually point to my avatar quote)
I've got a bike you can ride it if you like
And when I have some words
This is the way I'll sing
To a distortion box
To make it menacing
Then, I'm gonna have to write a chorus
Gonna need to have a chorus
And this seems to be as good as any other place to sing it till I'm blue in the face, yeah,
We're gonna need to have a chorus,
Gonna have to write a chorus,
nd this seems to be as good as any other place to sing it till I'm blue in the face.
Happy with what you have to be happy with to be happy with what you have you
have to be happy with what you have, happy with what you have to be happy
with you have to be happy with what you have, to be happy with what you
have, you have to be happy with what you have to be happy wiiith
Cobra handling and cocaine use are a bad mix.
See, now I thought that was funny. Ade was making fun of "modern" rock music. I like that when they come back from the guitar solo, the pre-chorus changes to "We're gonna repeat the chorus/I guess we're gonna repeat the chorus", etc.
I'm wondering if I didn't read (somewhere like in Bennett's Out Bloody Rageous or Wyatt's memoirs) that Wyatt was just testing and improvising the text along when writing the melody and it just stuck
anyway, I 'm also finding it brilliant dadaistic and it is Wyatt at his utter best, IMHO
my music collection increased tenfolds when I switched from drug-addicts to complete nutcases.
Actually, I love those lyrics too (and most of Belew's KC lyrics). I intended this as a metacomment on the Wyatt selection (i.e., I find that brilliant too).
Cobra handling and cocaine use are a bad mix.
I love those lyrics. A lot. Oh well. What do I know?
The Prog Corner
Short people got no reason
Short people got no reason
Short people got no reason
To live
They got little hands
And little eyes
And they walk around
Tellin' great big lies
They got little noses
And tiny little teeth
They wear platform shoes
On their nasty little feet
Well, I don't want no short people
Don't want no short people
Don't want no short people
'Round here
Short people are just the same
As you and I
(A fool such as I)
All men are brothers
Until the day they die
(It's a wonderful world)
Short people got nobody
Short people got nobody
Short people got nobody
To love
They got little baby legs
And they stand so low
You got to pick 'em up
Just to say hello
They got little cars
That got beep, beep, beep
They got little voices
Goin' peep, peep, peep
They got grubby little fingers
And dirty little minds
They're gonna get you every time
Well, I don't want no short people
Don't want no short people
Don't want no short people
'Round here
As someone who is 5-4, I've never really liked the lyrics in this song, although the bridge sorta makes things right.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and... clever" -- David St. Hubbins & Derek Smalls, Spinal Tap
You do know the story behind it, don't you?
In the Seventies, Randy Newman somehow ran afoul of Irving Azoff, who was one of the most powerful managers in the music business, one of the most aggressively out to win at any cost, one of the most vengeful, one of the most litigious - and was not very tall. Newman was apparently sufficiently annoyed at him to write that song, and it became a hit, but he - understandably - did not exactly publicize that it was about one person in particular, and not all short people.
Besides which, Newman has a history of writing "ironic" songs (see: Rednecks, Political Science, Shame, It's Money That Matters, They Just Got Married, Pretty Boy, etc.)
I assure you, he doesn't hate short people. My first wife was 4'11" and she hated that song too. Dang sensitive dwarves.
I'm sure plenty of people don't like Fat Man by Jethro Tull either. Least of all Mick Abrahams, who is rumored to have felt it was a poke at him at the time (even though he never seemed overweight to me until he was much older).
Interviewer of reprobate ne'er-do-well musicians of the long-haired rock n' roll persuasion at: www.velvetthunder.co.uk and former scribe at Classic Rock Society. Only vaguely aware of anything other than music.
*** Join me in the Garden of Delights for 3 hours of tune-spinning... every Saturday at 5pm EST on Deep Nuggets radio! www.deepnuggets.com ***
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