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.