For a lazy Bank Holiday Monday afternoon, here, quite simply, are some songs that make me laugh.
It was another blogger (I think Peter Burnet?) who introduced the brilliant Why Can’t a Woman be More Like a Man? to my consciousness. Alan Jay Lerner – who wrote the libretto for My Fair Lady – was actually married eight times, so you can decide for yourself what light, if any, that fact casts on the lyric (he was also addicted to amphetamines, after coming under the ‘care’ of Max “Dr Feelgood” Jacobson). Rex Harrison (married a mere six times) employs his unique ‘talking to the music’ style to great effect here – it’s always a pleasure to see someone making the most of the hand he’s been dealt.
Randy Newman next, author of many a fine and funny song. I particularly love The World Isn’t Fair, first, because it’s as damning yet regretful a critique of the failed ideals of Marxism as you’ll find, and second because of that ‘froggish men’ line. Wonderful.
Alex Turner, frontman of The Arctic Monkeys, is the bright songwriting star of his generation: biting, witty and a prodigiously gifted rhyme-merchant. His skill lies in his ability to write about everyday stuff and make that universal, rather than trying to just be universal and achieving only vacuousness (see Coldplay, Snow Patrol etc). Fluorescent Adolescent is a joy: very funny/sad words and a fizzy little tune.
And last, from a Fluorescent Adolescent to an Effervescing Elephant… the tragic, madcap, crazy diamond Syd Barrett. This silly number (which closes his final solo album ‘Barrett’) is one of my wife’s favourite songs, which I suppose illustrates why we get on so well.
One of Lerner’s ex-wives was said to have quipped: “Marriage is Alan’s way of saying goodbye”.
Why Can’t a Woman be More Like a Man is actually more a poke at male cluelessness. The misogny was here, although he can’t have been that serious in light of this.
I sense a thesis here Peter: ‘The Gender Wars, with reference to the songs from My Fair Lady’…
I’m sorry, Brit, you’ll have to take up the challenge. The six years I spent completeing “Libertarianism and Hello Dolly” plum tuckered me out.
It probably doesn’t reflect well on me that my favourite line in Fluorescent Adolescent is the willy joke, “Was it a Mecca-dabber or a betting pencil?”
heh heh, yes that’s a corker, isn’t it?