Monday, June 7, 2010

Heard it on the Radi-Adi-O

I would have posted this video yesterday, but I wanted to keep my previous post up for a while, because it concerned two friends of mine. Once again, I am posting the video for a song featured on the Platter Hour segment of Big Al's New Music Smorgasbord on my favorite college radio station. Last Sunday morning, Big Al featured the album In a Roman Mood by Boston new wave band Human Sexual Response, named for the classic text by Masters and Johnson. While I hadn't heard anything from this particular album before, the singles Jackie Onassis and What Does Sex Mean to Me? (a personal favorite) received quite a bit of airplay on the late, lamented WLIR. The album opens up with Andy Fell, which seems merely to be a catchy song, until one realizes that the lyrics reveal a devastating narrative (it's rather like OMD's incredibly pretty, ultimately shattering Enola Gay in this regard).

I'm posting the video for Land of the Glass Pinecones, because I've been on a Borges binge lately, and this song is reminiscent of a short-short Borges piece:





I was able to find the lyrics to the tune on... uh... er... um... a Final Fantasy 7 Fan Fiction (? !) site:

Land of the glass pinecones
Their seeds are made of rhinestones
The squirrels never scatter them
They know what rhinestone seeds portend.


It's silly, yet has a bit of an ominous undercurrent- They know what rhinestone seeds portend? I think Borges would have characterized each glass pinecone as a philosophy, with each rhinestone seed being a tenet of said philosophy- the whole being a microcosm of the cognitive history of humankind. Like any particular Borges piece, one has to wonder whether it's profound, a put-on, or both. Trippy stuff, indeed, an airier counterpart to the The Thirteenth Floor Elevators' Slip Inside this House.

Please note, in the Youtube playlist, the third item, a song which was aired on live television, causing a local controversy.

3 comments:

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

I remember HSR, don't think I ever bought one of their albums though. (Back then, people bought albums, and/or made tapes, if I recall correctly.)
~

zombie rotten mcdonald said...

thunder, didn't you realize that Home Taping Was Killing Music?

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

thunder, didn't you realize that Home Taping Was Killing Music?

WMG, we hardly knew ye!