Musical/Theological Notebook: Odes of Solomon and Bob
Somehow, in a day (and night) devoted almost entirely to finishing my re-write of my "Odes of Solomon as Apocalyptic Literature" article, I managed to discover the following:
In high school, I developed a real fondness for listening to Dr. Demento late Sunday nights and in particular his young superstar of comic music, "Weird Al" Yankovic. While that was no doubt enough to convict me of nerdiness by my peers, I just couldn't help but often finding the parodies more interesting than the original songs, especially when the originals carried the weight of attached musician self-importance.
That said, you can't just ascribe a vague, "class clown" cleverness to Al in "Bob," this send-up of Bob Dylan's classic early "video" of "Subterranean Homesick Blues." If you simply assigned any songwriter the task of constructing a song composed entirely of palindromes, and to do so in the specific style of a songwriter, so that such a lyrical nightmare might actually sound like something of the original artist's - well, that's just flat-out crazy. Impossible. And Al does it here, so I think I'm going to join Cobain in calling Al a musical genius. Seriously.
Click to viewIn high school, I developed a real fondness for listening to Dr. Demento late Sunday nights and in particular his young superstar of comic music, "Weird Al" Yankovic. While that was no doubt enough to convict me of nerdiness by my peers, I just couldn't help but often finding the parodies more interesting than the original songs, especially when the originals carried the weight of attached musician self-importance.
That said, you can't just ascribe a vague, "class clown" cleverness to Al in "Bob," this send-up of Bob Dylan's classic early "video" of "Subterranean Homesick Blues." If you simply assigned any songwriter the task of constructing a song composed entirely of palindromes, and to do so in the specific style of a songwriter, so that such a lyrical nightmare might actually sound like something of the original artist's - well, that's just flat-out crazy. Impossible. And Al does it here, so I think I'm going to join Cobain in calling Al a musical genius. Seriously.