On the Fourth I'm a Novelty Song Junkie

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the Earth goes round the Sun; today, to believe the past is inalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong. ---Orwell

Last week, a lazy Fourth found me taking a vacation from just about everything in my life except loafing around in refuge from the humid heat wave.

In the fight for freedom, I'm such a slacker. Thankfully Sheridanesque folks like Mark Dice were out in the open-air looney bin called America, doing the yeoman's work of cutting-edge political journalism:

or along the same lines, these folks, who were interviewing some of the nation's best and brightest about the meaning of American freedom in Santa Barbara.

Thanks to these people and many, many others, I got to spend the entire afternoon indoors in luxurious air conditioning playing old pop songs off YouTube. After a discussion of the 1960's poet Rod McKuen, Red and I got sidetracked for several hours into pulling up songs that were popular around the time she was born.

What started it off was this famous ballad, of course, since it was penned by McKuen. In third grade we had corny alternative lyrics to it, ones that I sang for Red. The song, which hit #1 on the Billboard chart for three weeks, was new to her.

I told her that I knew pretty much all the songs that were popular back then. Hearing them brought back pleasant childhood memories. But given my age at the time, the ones I remembered most vividly from that era were the novelty songs. Red hadn't heard most of them, so it was fun to introduce her to this one (also #1 Billboard hit), this one (also a Billboard #1 hit), and this one (from a slightly later vintage).

This last one was especially fun to introduce to her, since she studies nutrition (I had to explain to her who Euell Gibbons was). It's funny how some things are so timeless. But how many pop songs today would make a comedic reference to this piece of literature?

"Back then they made anthology albums just of novelty songs," I said. It was a different time, as they say.

Not surprisingly, the songs from that era that she most wanted to hear were the ones of lasting musical quality. I remembered many of these playing over the loudspeakers in Woolworth's while buying Topps baseball cards or checking out the gerbil cages in the pet section.

While we were listening to Roberta Flack's "Feel Like Makin' Love," I blurted out, "I can't believe I was listening to this over and over when I was ten years old. It's so erotic!"

Of course at the time, the implications of the lyrics were beyond my childhood comprehension.  I told Red that I once had a friend my age whose parents would not let her listen to any pop music in her youth, for exactly this reason. The only pop singer she was allowed to listen to back then was the late great Henry John Deutschendorf, a few of whose songs we played.

My friend's restriction from listening to pop music would have seemed weird to me back then, but now it strikes me as somewhat sane---and I don't even have kids.

Flack's soft crooning is, in my opinion, far more erotic than almost anything coming out today from the so-called "major artists." No way could I imagine Beyoncé pulling off that song, for example, or deus me livre, Taylor Swift. It would come across either as hypercrude or over-the-top ironic.

Beyoncé is one "artist" I cannot even stand to watch. Seeing her perform in the Super Bowl halftime was like witnessing a ghastly freak show gone wrong. Her dancing looks downright inhuman to me, in an extraterrestrial sort of way, as if she's trying to imitate the herky-jerk of a character in a video that is downloading over a slow Internet connection. Feminine is the last word that springs to my mind. I'm not into female  sexbots, thank you very much.

I told Red that last summer while staying at a friend's place, and having nothing better to do one afternoon, I stumbled on the VH-1 list of the top 100 songs from the 2000's, an era of pop music of which I had little knowledge. I was, as they say, out of touch during much of that time.

I killed that entire evening by drilling down that list of songs, starting at number one and watching each video in turn all the way through.

"It was one of the most mind-deadening experiments I've ever performed," I said. "I reached 44 or 45 before I just couldn't take it anymore. I felt like my soul was being sucked out of my body."

At the time I didn't recognize most of the songs in the Top Ten. Most of them struck me as crapitudinous screeching. Apparently Beyoncé dominated the decade. I was thankful I hadn't given her much attention during that time.

As I told Red, I feel special contempt for Beyoncé's husband and partner in musicocide, Jay Z (even before I saw this humorous video about his religious beliefs). I mockingly sang for her the substitute lyrics I'd made up for his ditty about New York City, which I was shocked to find ranked way up in the Top 10 of the VH-1 list:  

New York---every cliché that I can think of, about New York...

Gotham deserves better songs than that. The clichés of the future are born today. Who's making them up now?


Fortunately there were a few decent finds on the list, and even a couple gems. For example, I'd never heard Amy Winehouse, and when I watched this video I was struck by what an amazing talent she had been. She seemed so full of life, and so feminine in a powerful earthy way.

But after getting as far down the list as I could bear to go, my favorite pop song from that decade remains the sole song from the VH-1 Top 10 that I had actually heard prior to my experiment. It was a hard tune to miss during that era. It was used in many Hollywood movies and trailers during the years when I practically lived inside movie theaters across the country around the world.

Despite its popularity, it remains one of my theme songs lately. If you looked at that VH-1 list, it would be obvious which one I mean, but just in case, I'll save you the trouble. It's so danceable with that repeating bass riff...ha, ha, ha...bless your soul...