Has it been a year already? More than. Check out this week’s entry, King Me, a parable about a completely fictional elected official who grows increasingly impotent in the twilight of his term. Completely fictional. That’ll be obvious.
The long-awaited remix of I Hate You is now available for streaming on my myspace page!
All the stuff in this song really happened, more or less. It’s more true than your average James Frey memoir in any case.
Don’t forget to get your vote in before 1:00 p.m. (EST) March 24.
Edit: Voting is now closed. I tied for second place, or, if you prefer, “First Loser.”
This week’s Songfight! entry is a found sound composition consisting of unadulterated media samples related to the Hurricane Katrina disaster.
Bits of unused lyrics are beginning to collect on my hard drive. I wasn’t planning on submitting an entry for “Rattle”, even though it seemed a rare opportunity to submit an instrumental tune. But before I could stop it, my brain cranked this out:
rattle
what do you call this creek we’re in and where’s my paddle
we’ll win the war without this battle
so let the baby have his rattle
…along with some clever ideas involving shaking the rainstick in 11/8 time. A rainstick is a percussion instrument, by the way, for those of you who thought that was a euphemism.
This gets added to a growing list of Songfight!s that I didn’t get around to entering, including
one less
one less bottle to drink
one more crime in the kitchen sink
one tough row to hoe
gotta backflush the filter when the water won’t flow
I’m not certain what that was supposed to be about, but I sure like the way it scans.
The actual title of this week’s Songfight! is Come a-Hellin’, but while that has its own idiomatic charm, I don’t think it really says so much as a title. And because song titles are kind of arbitrary, I’ll submit this song as Come a-Hellin’, but you and I will know that the real title is Time Been On My Tail – it’ll be our little secret.
If you were ever in a Cub Scout troop you may know that these organizations can have any number of leaders, as long as they are all named after characters from Kipling’s Jungle Book and the alpha is a male named Akela. Our alpha was indeed quite alpha, an ex-military man who in retrospect reminds me a great deal of Buster Keaton, only without the gift for physical comedy, or, when you get right down to it, much of a sense of humour at all.
After all the games, group activities and so forth, the Cub Scout meeting ends in a circle on the floor of a church basement around an empty space that you can pretend is a fire. In this environment Show and Tells are shown and told, badges and other awards are doled out, and stories are recounted. And it was around the imaginary campfire that one of our leaders, a woman who we knew as “Kaa”, recounted for us how as a child she looked forward to the weekends more than anything else she could imagine, but that now Saturdays seemed to come and go by “like that”, and she punctuated that with the snap of a finger.
I’m sure that her message was well intended, an important lesson along the lines of “treasure your youth” or “make the most of every day” or something like that, but all I could think was, “Well fuck, that’s a pretty heavy trip to lay on a bunch of nine-year-olds.”
I’ve been waiting over a quarter of a century for the opportunity to write a song about it, and this week’s Songfight! has graciously provided it.
I think the Montuno Boogie deserves further exploration, but the mixdown was rushed and I sounded rather a lot like Lee Majors that day. Go! Go vote!
No, not you. Unless you’re the guy I wrote that song about. The one I submitted as my first Songfight! entry.