The Atrocious Music Collection: #35 in a series
Artist: Mostly Unknown
Song Titles: Various
Category: Song-Poems
Year: unknown
Cover art style: N/A
Audio:
Acquisition: uncertain.
Election day 2018 is neigh, so the Collection presents four political songs. There’s a long history of political songs in America, and these are definitely NOT part of it.
Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter Says Yes are part of the song-poem exploitation industry discussed already in a previous post. As noted there, one website describes these publishing and recording companies, which solicit poems (and dollars) to set those poems to music and record them, as occupying “the lowest rungs of the music industry ladder for over 100 years.”
While Jimmy Carter is funky and light-hearted, the Richard Nixon song has a seriousness which is frightening. There are few lyrics, so we have to hear these words four times in less than three minutes, each time solemnly intoned:
Put Richard Nixon on this Earth
To bring to us his heritage
One of priceless worth
The non-repeating stanzas (there are only three) include claims that “all who’ve met him love him so” and that his heritage includes “the rapture of music and melody/of cultural and love.” Both are dubious claims out of step with not only current Nixon scholarship but of Nixon scholarship from any era in history, frankly.
Jimmy Carter gets much more into the wonky stuff. Can our government can be competent, honest, and transparent? “Jimmy Carter says yes.”
Both of these songs can be found on the modern-day anthology of song-poems, American Song-Poem Anthology: Do you Know the Difference Between Big Wood and Brush? If you are wondering about the difference between big wood and brush, that is a song on the album, but unfortunately you won't get your questioned answered because the song is really about cheating on your wife.
I can’t tell you any of the background of the song John F. Kennedy, which may not even be the full title of this song. It’s a difficult subject to successfully Google search for as there are many more tributes to JFK than JEC and RMN. I suspect this is also a song-poem, as the lyrics are clunky (at best) and often miss the mark:
Someone wanted to see him defeated
He saw that there’s really no use
Because there nothing anyone wanted to do.
There’s some pronoun uncertainty here – who exactly saw that there’s really no use? – as well as general uncertainty – what does the last line mean? – as well as some historically questionable assigning of motives to Lee Harvey Oswald. I suppose wanting to kill someone is a form of wanting “to see him defeated,” but considering the stanza contains no rhymes, one would think you could come up with a better line.
Finally, we have another song I’ve not been able to find anywhere, and again, searching for it is hard because I believe the title of the song is Senators Sit Around and Talk a Lot, and you try putting that into a search engine.
Weirdly, the song leaves Congress quickly. Once the space race with Russia gets mentioned, the song's lyrics turn their attention to flying around in space. There’s also a bit about how when we beat the Russians to “Mars and back” (yes, Mars, not the moon), and when a senator turned to Daniel Boone and said, “Boone, we kilt us a bear.”
(Apologies for the small hiccup in this track. Like the other songs, it’s from a cassette tape and this song ended up split between the two sides of the tape – kind of like the Senate is split, maybe.)
So hope all you political junkies enjoy these tracks ,and don’t forget to vote!