Hey, I Can Lift My Knuckles From the Ground!

Back in the mid-90's, when my two younger brothers were still in college, their friends would often descend upon the family abode for a weekend of partying and letting off steam. Oddly enough, after a Saturday night of drinking enough to float a sizable sailing vessel, a couple of us would hit the local bookstore to pick up the Sunday New York Times and we would pass it around while eating a large "hangover mitigation" breakfast. One morning, while on the paper run with "Whisky Joe", we decided to stop at a table in the bookstore cafe to guzzle a cup of coffee. There we were, two rough looking customers amid the post-church crowd. I turned to Whisky Joe and intoned, "Some people have yahooism thrust upon them, they don't have a choice in the matter, but we choose to be yahoos. We're sophisticated, educated yahoos." From then on, the Sunday paper run became known as "The Educated Yahoos Club".

As an educated yahoo, I have to confess that my exposure to the works of composer Akira Ifukube was strictly through the soundtrack work he did for Toho films. Ifukube was the genius behind the outstanding 1954 Godzilla soundtrack, including the iconic "roar" of the monster:





Poking around the intert00bz, I found one of Ikufube's earlier classic compositions, the beautiful 1935 Japanese Rhapsody:





Ifukube was also an ethnomusicologist... as a youth on the island of Hokkaido, he became acquainted with the music and culture of the Ainu people. Here is an excerpt from his 1949 vocal composition, Three Lullabys of the Native People of Sakhalin





Amazing what you learn when you decide to lift your knuckles off the ground and explore the more "highfalutin'" aspects of the career of a guy who's mainly known for his gorgeous sountracks for movies about giant moths.