The Atrocious Music Collection: #37 in a series
Artist: Various
Song Titles: Various
Category: Song-Poems
Year: unknown
Cover art style: N/A
Audio:
- Among of Our Foods
Song poems have been discussed in another Atrocious Music post, but to briefly recap: ads solicit poems from anyone, promising to set them to music and then record them, at a cost to the poet, and the companies that truck in these pretty much do every poem that is sent to them, usually in a slap-dash way, thereby maximizing profits
There are about 25 song-poems on this cassette. A few of them appear in the political songs post. Others don't really meet the definition of Atrocious Music - for example the Hump Dance and Do the Turkey come off as undistinguished dance songs (like The Twist, just not very good - and not terribly awful).
There are some other bits on the cassette, including some Perrey & Kingsley (available in posts on the two Incredibly Strange Music CDs, here and here). There are also three Shaggs songs from their one album (1969's Philosophy of the World). The Shaggs' iconic outsider music status might place them firmly in The Collection, but their relative fame makes me reluctant to include them. As it is easy to access their work and information about the group, I will refrain from a formal ruling, and if you want to listen yourself, go right ahead: My Pal Foot Foot, That Little Sports Car, and Philosophy of the World are all on YouTube.
With those preliminaries out the way, onward to the song-poems worthy of our time, so to speak...
I find the themes people choose to write these song poems about to be fascinating – everything from Presidents to candy to drums to Mars to Johnny Carson. How these poems express those thoughts is what initially might attract our attention. The awkward rhymes, or simply the lack of rhymes. The odd phrases. The uneven line-lengths. The strange foci.
Among of Our Foods is particularly perplexing, beginning:
To have differed with yearly
And all known dearly
It doesn’t get any more coherent, although the “chorus” suggests there’s something here about being thankful for our breakfast, lunch and dinner, but even that takes some serious reading into the lyrics, which seem strangely fixated on prepositions and conjunctions and adverbs.
As the average we use of thee
Among of our foods
Meanwhile, the early sentiment in Loving is the Doing – which seems to be about loving each other – gives way to a strange equation where making ourselves the center of our universe will lead to a new world following an apocalypse in which the old world burns. Or something like that. So, not quite the same as I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing.
Johnny Carson is cute, cataloging what you might see on The Tonight Show on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday…you get the idea.
Give Me That Candy begins as a list song around candy types, but when we reach the line Let’s sharpen up that superego, things seem to go in an odd direction. I had to rewind the track to make sure I had really heard that. This is followed by
Oh, how I love the street life
an unusual sentiment, and not one usually associated with candy. But that's how things go with these songs - there is a sense that the author of the words has something very particular in mind, but fails to convey it in a way such that anyone else can decode it. Perhaps it is a kind of outsider art which suffers from too much of an insider viewpoint.