Even-Handed Agitprop

What better subject for a brand new song than Australia’s recent spectacular success with asylum seekers? It’s been a triumph, obviously, but I did a little research, and found there’s a rich, happy history to all this success.

PS You can tell it’s a brand new song, because the lyrics are propped in front of me. I almost never allow that.

PPS Recorded last Friday, September 26, at Eastern Riverina Arts, where they host occasional, tiny “office gigs”.

A New Song, Both Charming and Scurrilous

Like many of our mothers, mine thinks I’m cleverer than I am. So when she lent me the CD sets pictured below …

… it was with the words “You probably know everything on there anyway.”

I did not. And sometimes I knew things, but Professor Bill Messenger put them in a different light and made me slap my forehead for not seeing them that way myself.

For instance, he points out, while covering the period beginning in the 1890s, that “in Tin Pan Alley, mother songs fell to the earth like ivory snow”, but that “to my knowledge not one mother song has been written during the past fifty years”.

So I thought I’d write one. A modern one. Yes, I’m aware that my own mother’s generosity has led me to writing the following. Like many of our mothers, I think she’ll forgive me:

Oh, you want the sheet music? For piano and voice? Right here.

 

 

New Song: I Am Sick to Death of Hearing About the Weimar Republic

A fairly self-explanatory title, with a song to match. Warning: it contains one F-bomb, used as an intransitive verb.

 

Thanks to @spikelynch for rhyming “poets and whores” with “between the wars”. Once I accidentally rhymed this further with “metaphors”, I had to steal it.

If anyone is too young to find the Weimar Republic thing utterly cliched and trite, give yourself about three years.

An Original Christmas Song, For Your Delectation

I was at the back of the express lane at Woolies, Calwell, around the middle of December 2008, and the guy in front of me realised he’d forgotten something.  He left the queue to fetch it.  When he got back, the following exchange occurred:

Me:  It’s alright, just go back in front of me.

Him:  Really?

Me:  Yeah, it’s fine, I’m not in a hurry.

Him:  OK.

Woman at checkout:  Wow!  You don’t see much of that at this time of year!

Hence:

At Christmas Time

Let the song be sung,
Let us all revere
The man who kept his manners
Throughout this time of year.

He said, “After you, excuse me,
No worries, not at all.”
No kicking other people’s children
When at the shopping mall.

So we make him immortal in music.
We celebrate his deeds in rhyme.
The man who was not a dick
At Christmas time.

Let the tale be told,
Let the bards relate
Of she who finished eating
With food upon her plate.
She said, “I am full, no really,
I’ve reached my Plimsoll line.”
A miracle, she called it quits at
Her second glass of wine.

So we make her immortal in music.
We celebrate her deeds in rhyme.
The girl who was not a pig
At Christmas time.

Was not a pig, (was not a pig),
Was not a dick, (was not a dick),
Was not a pig, (was not a pig),
Was not a fatty, fatty boomstick.
Guts, (was not a guts),
Was not a dick, (was not a dick),
Was not a guts, was not a dick, not a pig, was not a prick.

So let the shrines be built,
One for every spot
Where people bought things only
With money what they got.

Salute the folks who – just once –
Didn’t turn into a bunch of selfish …

And we make them immortal in music.
We celebrate their deeds in rhyme.
The people who were modest,well-mannered,
Who were happy
At Christmas time.

Incidentally, this is only in three parts, except for the final cadence.  It sounds like more than three because of the reverb and chorus effects lavished upon it.  It is Christmas, after all.