The first time I heard the Waco Brothers’ song “The Wickedest City in the World”, I was surprised to hear that the city was Chicago. Not that I had a specific alternative candidate in mind - I just thought that Chicago, while definitely in the Top Ten of wicked cities, was surely not Number One, even among American cities. Lately, I’ve come to realize the Waco Brothers were right, at least on this point.

However, I cannot recommend the song without reserve, because it also contains these lyrics:

I am just a hog,
falling off a log.
Vote for me, or I will kill your dog.

Those may not be the worst lyrics ever written, or even the worst lyrics on my iTunes, but they’re definitely among the Top Ten in that category. (Really bad lyrics usually keep a song entirely out of my music collection.)

Does a 125th birthday count as a significant anniversary? If so — also if not — today is Alban Berg’s 125th. In commemoration, I’m playing the only really tolerable pieces written by the New Vienna School, Berg’s Violin Concerto and Lyric Suite for String Quartet. Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg published a few other pieces that are not just tolerable but very pleasant, but they are arrangements of Strauss waltzes — the Old Vienna School reworked by the New — so they don’t really count.

So what would we call a 125th birthday? A hemi-demi-semi-millennium, of course.

By the way, ‘Alban’ seems an odd name for a German. I mostly know it from the name of the Alban Mount, southeast of Rome. It’s odd that ‘Berg’ is German for mount(ain), though the mountain is apparently not called the Albanberg in German. The ancient Roman name is singular, Albanus Mons, but German Wikipedia gives the plural ‘Albaner Berge’ as the preferred form, with ‘Albaner Hügel’ and ‘Albanergebirge’ as alternatives. I still wonder if Alban’s father was indulging in a pun: perhaps a native speaker can tell us.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell twice quotes a song popular among the proles of his imagined future, “composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator”. He calls it “dreadful rubbish” and a “driveling song”, but it seems to me that it would fit right in to the Great American Songbook. Of course, we cannot judge the music, but I have certainly heard worse words. Here are the lyrics, with the proletarian (Cockney) mispronunciations edited out:

It was only a hopeless fancy,
It passed like an April day,
But a look and a word and the dreams they stirred
They have stolen my heart away!

They say that time heals all things,
They say you can always forget;
But the smiles and the tears across the years
They twist my heartstrings yet!

(George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, II.iv and II.x)

It is not deep, but other than the awkward rhythm of the fifth line, I don’t see anything embarrassingly wrong with it. Do I need a taste-bud transplant?

The Blogosphere is busy arguing whether Tom Daschle should be approved as Secretary of Health and Human Services, despite being an obvious tax cheat. I would have thought that was a no-brainer: of course not. The question people ought to be arguing is whether he should be hauled away in handcuffs or at least grilled further about his finances, not by the Senate but by someone with the power to indict him. I lean towards ‘yes’ on the second question. Why is no one — or no one of importance — even asking it?

I’m not sure why my comments aren’t working, and why I can’t even use FTP. Until I can fix that, readers may contact me by e-mail at the following address, after carefully reversing it: gro.liveewrd@liveewrd.

I know of three examples of this interesting phenomenon. Can anyone add more?

1. The second stanza of “The Wreck of the Old 97″:

Then he turned around and said to his black, greasy fireman,
“Shovel on a little more coal.
And when we cross that White Oak mountain,
Watch Ol’ ’97 roll.”

On at least one of this albums, Mac Wiseman changes this to “big ol’ greasy fireman”. Of course, the original text has nothing to do with race. Any man who spends his day shoveling coal into the open door of a furnace is going to be black from the soot and greasy as soon as he works up enough of a sweat to mix with the soot. Granted that some firemen may have been black to start with, there’s no reason to suppose that this one was, or that it would have made any difference to the song if he were.

2. One couplet of Bob Wills’ rather disjointed “Take Me Back to Tulsa” reads:

Little bee sucks the blossom, big bee gets the honey,
Dark man picks the cotton, white man gets the money.

On The Archive Series, Vol. 2, Dan Walser changes this to:

Well, the little bee sucks the blossom, but the big bee gets the honey,
The little man raise the cotton, but the big man gets the money.

3. One of Johnny Cash’s best-known lines is this, from “Folsom Prison Blues”:

I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.

On Kindred Spirits: A Tribute to the Songs of Johnny Cash, Keb’ Mo’ changes this to:

They say I shot a man in Reno, but that was just a lie.

I can see why a black man might not feel entirely comfortable singing the original lyrics, but the change wrecks the song. It would have been better to pick another song if he couldn’t do this one ‘straight’.

In a post on “Cover songs almost as good as the originals (and sometimes better)”, VodkaPundit writes “‘Nouvelle Vague’ is Portuguese for ‘New Wave’”. Actually, the phrase is French, not Portuguese, and was used to describe the movies* of Godard, Truffaut, and some of their contemporaries long before the band (which I’d never heard of) borrowed the name. According to Wikipedia, the band’s second album was Bande à Part, which is also a 1964 Godard movie, so the name must be homage rather than coincidence.

When the original ‘nouvelle vague’ appeared in the 1950s, the phrase puzzled Evelyn Waugh, who couldn’t tell whether it was supposed to mean ‘new wave’ or ‘vague novel’.

For the subject of VodkaPundit’s post, I nominate Dwight Yoakam’s cover of Baby, Don’t Go (with Sheryl Crow). It’s the best thing on the album Under the Covers. Until I heard it, I hadn’t realized that Sonny Bono had ever written a song that was any good at all. Yoakam’s cover of Kinky Friedman’s Rapid City, South Dakota is (in my opinion) slightly better than the original.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Yes, I know, I should call them ‘films’ or ‘cinema’. Sorry, not going to do it.

The spine of Volume 5 of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians lists the contents as ‘Canon to Classic Rock’.

I don’t believe I’ve ever seen this in manuals of rhetoric or lists of figures of speech, but these three sentences all use the same rhetorical trick:

1. Nice we’re having weather, isn’t it?
2. What’s a girl like you doing in a nice place like this?
3. I’ve got high friends in places all over time.

The last is the title of one of the three good songs on what is apparently the only album by Scott McQuaig. Can anyone quote more examples? I have a feeling I’ve forgotten one or two.

Randall Jarrell describes a student art exhibit at a fictional women’s college (”Benson”):

The students had learned all the new ways to paint something (an old way, to them, was a way not to paint something) but thye had not had anything to paint. The paintings were paintings of nothing at all. It did not seem possible to you that so many things could have happened to a piece of canvas in vain. You looked at a painting and thought, “It’s an imitation Arshile Gorky; it’s casein and aluminum paint on canvasboard, has been scratched all over with a razor blade, and then was glazed–or scumbled, perhaps–with several transparent oil washes.” And when you had said this there was no more for you to say. If you had given a Benton student a pencil and a piece of paper, and asked her to draw something, she would have looked at you in helpless astonishment: it would have been plain to her that you knew nothing about art. By the time a Benton artist got through exploiting the possibilities of her medium, it was too dark to do anything else that day; and most of the students never learned that there was anything else to do.

(Pictures from an Institution, Chapter 6, “Art Night”, section 2)

I was reminded of this by A. C. Douglas’ comments (here and here) on a contemporary composer’s desciption of how he composes his works. He may be a bit unfair to the composer, who does imply that he has to have an idea before he can tinker with it.

Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, the 2004 Glyndebourne production:

I’ve seen all of Il Trittico once before (on DVD) and found Il Tabarro a terrible bore, Suor Angelica only intermittently interesting, mostly in the bits of church music, and Gianni Schicchi thoroughly entertaining. I wonder why Puccini didn’t do more comedies.

Perhaps not the most appropriate lyric for a Sunday morning, but I haven’t gone to bed yet from Saturday, and I can’t get the song out of my head:

Arnold was an armadillo
And oh so in need of romance
And it chanced that one Saturday evening
Arnold went to a dance

The moment he walked in the room
He saw her, as if he had known
She’d be there, by the side of the stage
All he wanted, all in black, all alone

She was there, she was his, dressed to kill, oh
if only his glasses were cleaner . . .
He was an armadillo
She was a concertina

He struggled to make conversation
He leap-frogged from topic to topic
If only she’d say something back . . .
If only he weren’t so myopic

Bright silver buttons in rows
From head down to toes in black leather . . .
Could this beauty love him?
“Here goes,” Arnold thought,
“It’s now or never!”

He could picture her head on his pillow
He had loved her the moment he’d seen her
He was an armadillo
She was a concertina

You can’t help but feel for the lad, oh
How happy poor Arnold would be
If they could make love in the shadows
And no one, but no one, would see

Alas, what he hoped might have been a
Sweet secret was soured completely
Sex with a concertina
Is rarely accomplished discreetly

The dancers stopped stripping the willow
It was oh such a loud misdemeanor
He was an armadillo
She was a concertina

Picture love as a kind of concerto
Poor Arnold, his first was unfinished
For what let everyone who was there know
A very loud C sharp diminished

Someone said, “Look, it’s Arnold,”
And he ran from their scorn and their laughter
Into the darkness outside
And never returned ever after

Tales of lost love and dreams unfulfilled, oh
Cruel Cupid, you’ve never been meaner
He was an armadillo
She was a concertina

The song is “Arnold”, by the Austin Lounge Lizards, from their 2006 album The Drugs I Need. I wonder if they read Protein Wisdom? The previous song mentions bloggers. Perhaps I’ll post the lyrics to it as well.

Eve Tushnet has a top-ten post on horror in pop songs. Unfortunately, I’ve never heard of any of the songs, and only one of the performers – Siouxsie and the Banshies – who was (were?) the object of a Beavis & Butt-Head text-and-commentary segment. The last title on the Tushnet list is a song by the Cramps (whoever they are) called “Eyeball in my Martini”. My split-second reaction was “shouldn’t that be ‘Eyeball in my Highball’?”. A Google search shows that a song by that name has already been written, and is available for 50¢ from Lulu. I haven’t decided yet whether to pay for a copy.

Charles Rosen, The Classical Style, p. 170:

It was Handel who said that Gluck ‘knows no more counterpoint than my cook’ . . . Tovey has pointed out that Handel’s cook, who was also a singer in Handel’s opera company, probably knew a good bit of counterpoint.

Viking Pundit quotes an Afghan mullah:

Music is not banned in Islam but to get enjoyment from music is banned.

The West has long suffered from an overabundance of certain unlovely genres of music: twelve-tone, bitonal, microtonal, minimalist, electronic, some other kinds whose very names escape me — ask a Professor of Music Theory at your local university. Perhaps we can ship all our Stockhausen and Cage and Boulez CDs to the Muslim world. Pop music is generally popular only if some segment of the population derives enjoyment from it, but there are still a few artists on the non-classical side who can be counted on to repel just about everyone: Yoko Ono, of course, perhaps Cecil Taylor. I’m sure others will have better suggestions. I dimly recall from my brief stint working in a record store in 1975-76 a jazz group called the Revolutionary Trio that featured a violinist who played lots of double-stopped tritones.

What about the third ‘Win’ in my title?

Random Jottings and other sites have reported that the Society of Ethnomusicology has issued a statement opposing the use of music to torture prisoners. Would playing beautiful music to a follower of the Afghan mullah quoted above constitute torture? Would a Muslim who enjoyed listening to music be endangering his immortal soul? Should we therefore threaten recalcitrant prisoners with Schubert impromptus and Strauss waltzes and Haydn quartets, or would that be too beastly even for the vile Bush regime? Would playing Palestrina and Gregorian Chant and Bach cantatas be even viler, since the music is explicitly Christian? What if the prisoner begins to hum along? Would that damn his soul to Muslim Hell?

If the Afghan mullah is correct, Stockhausen would not be torture, but Bach would be. Cultural sensitivity turns out to be a lot more complicated than I thought it would be.

In a tirade on the uselessness of Spanish for high school and middle school students, John Derbyshire writes:

No offense to anyone, but Spain was always a bit of an outlier of Western Civ. Name a Spanish mathematician; hum a tune from a Spanish opera; etc., etc.

I don’t know that I could, but many opera lovers could certainly hum one tune from a Spanish opera. In the Act II finale of Don Giovanni, Mozart has the band play a tune from the previous year’s big hit, and the Don himself says ‘Ah! Una Cosa Rara.’ The composer, Vicente Martín y Soler, died 201 years ago today. I would dearly love to see a live or DVD performance of one of his operas. Una Cosa Rara and La Capricciosa Corretta sound wonderful to my untutored ears, but I’ve never found it easy to follow a comic plot by ear. Of course Derbyshire could object that the Spaniard Martín y Soler only won fame by leaving Spain and setting Italian and Russian librettos. (He died in St. Petersburg.)

Later in his post, Derbyshire recommends Latin and misquotes Catullus as writing Da me basia mille, deinde centum. That should be Da mi, where mi is the shortened form of dative mihi. Whether we take me as accusative or ablative, Da me basia mille is gibberish.

What his jailers could (and should) be playing for Saddam Hussein right about now: Johnny Cash’s “25 Minutes to Go” (lyrics here).

The Biology teacher at my school despises Wikipedia, but I think its usefulness depends a great deal on the subject. Anything technical is likely to be ill-informed, and anything political is almost certain to be tendentious, at least until someone corrects or hypercorrects it, but that still leaves subjects like Geography, where the articles are generally solid, and the soft spots are in obvious places (e.g. the Balkans).

Where allowing (or rather forcing) anonymous members of the general public to do all the work fails spectacularly is in iTunes information. It’s been two weeks since I figured out how to move my iTunes library off the hard drive of my laptop, where it was taking up 46G on a 60G drive and I was down to less than 1G available space, and onto my 100G peripheral hard drive. Since then, I’ve been ripping discs all day long whenever I’m at home, and now have 17,197 tracks, adding up to just over 42 days (and nights) of playing time and 81.63 gigabytes, with more to come. The 46G was mostly non-classical, and the newly-ripped stuff is virtually all classical. The main thing that takes time is correcting the information provided by iTunes. It’s bad enough that the format (which information goes in which slot) differs enormously even from disc to disc of a multiple album, but some of the errors are amazing. What kind of idiot thought that piano concerti with K. numbers were by “Mozzart” and should be classified as “Electronica/Dance Music”? It’s only very occasionally that an error is amusing rather than infuriating: I think it was on one of the Gothic Voices’ albums that I found two tracks labeled ‘Angus Dei’, making the Lamb of God into a calf (not a golden one, I hope).

iTunes allows users to upload alternative information, and I’ve learned that when two sets of data are listed, the second one is (not surprisingly) usually better, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to replace the ineptitudes instead of just supplementing them.

So why am I putting most of my classical CDs into iTunes? It’s not to make them portable, since they’re on the peripheral hard drive and I can’t listen to music at work, anyway. (I can play tunes for students, as appropriate, but private listening is out, since we need to keep an eye ear on what’s going on around us even when we’re not teaching.) There are three reasons:

1. Random shuffle, with single works ‘grouped’ as one, provides a cheap, easy way to test one’s ear for music. If a piano piece sounds like Chopin, but even wimpier, it’s probably Poulenc, but if it sounds like it was plagiarized from a folk-tune, it most likely was, by either Bartók or Villa-Lobos.
2. Some things are best in small doses. My opinion of Cliff Carlisle, “Blues Yodeler & Steel Guitar Wizard”, went way up after I put him on iTunes. Steel-guitar yodeling sounds much better in very small doses, best of all one at a time. The same goes for harpsichord music, where a whole disc is too much, though three or four cuts are tolerable.
3. Some things sound better when listened to without preconceptions. Years ago, I kept my record player and records in the office for a few weeks while I was living in temporary quarters, and my colleagues didn’t mind if I played them now and then. Several of them asked me who wrote one particularly pleasant piece and were disconcerted to hear that it was Arnold Schoenberg. (It was his wind quintet, Op. 26, if you’re wondering, which just goes to show that oboes and bassoons sound good, no matter what notes they play.) I’ve had the same effect more than once with my new iTunes setup, where I’m not prejudiced by vague ideas of which composers or works are supposed to be great or not great, deep or shallow, or distracted by unusually beautiful or ugly album covers.

Just as some of the minor poetasters of the 17th century would be utterly forgotten today if they had not been fortunate enough to be mocked in Pope’s Dunciad, some of the bands of the late 20th century, including many that were and are admired by critics or the general public or both, will only be remembered in a century or two because they were fortunate enough to be mocked by Beavis and Butt-Head.

What fact connects the following words?

cross, lane, return, rock, waltz

How about the following series of words and phrases?

amnesia, babe, baby, blues, crowd, gal, girls, hardwood floor, healin’, heart, husband, man, merry go round, moon, night time man, season, song, troubles, waltz, women

Too hard? If suffixes count, the second series also includes -in’ and -itis. And the two riddles are parallel: they have different answers, but work in much the same way. Answers may be placed in the comments. There is no prize but the honor of solving the puzzle. There may be another clue around here somewhere, too.