10:55 a.m. - 2003-11-30
you can't begrudge her style
crunch time, no kidding man. five hours in the darkroom yesterday, looking like another similar routine today plus time spent on 'picture pages' and my inane paper for feminist researchism. there won't be time to even THINK about bowling or teresita until at LEAST wednesday night or maybe even later than that. bo-gus.
if you're also suffering from the end-of-semester grind, perhaps some psychotic music will help. from the other day:
Song: Your Auntie Grizelda
Artist: The Monkees
Album: More of the Monkees
Sample Lyric: "So righteous making fudge / your Auntie Grizelda / So proper judging others over her tea."
Ampresands (out of 5): & & & &
Sure, the Monkees were a manufactured pop band that didn't write their own material or even perform any of it except the singing (at least on their early records) but, so what? There were tons of other similarly situated bands at the time; the fact that the Monkees were cynically assembled as part of a television promotion admittedly makes the studio chicanery behind them more high-profile, but it also means that the songwriting talent behind them is of a higher caliber than can be boasted by most of the bubblegum acts of the time. While their catalogue is full of duds, most of the professionally penned tunes are brilliantly constructed and brilliantly executed, with credits displaying all the top names of the time: Goffman & King, Sedaka, Diamond, et cetera et cetera. A healthy rummage through the Monkees archive reveals plenty of gems, and perhaps most enjoyably, a nicely sized collection of "wacky" songs, presumably created to show off the band's TV image as zany, pseudo-anarchic merry pranksters. These were throwaway songs at the time but I think a CD collecting just these numbers would probably be as enjoyable as, or maybe more enjoyable than, a traditional "greatest hits." This weird, wooly and wonderful underbelly of Monkees tunes includes the scat-babbling of "Goin' Down"(1), the banjo-flavored harmonizing of "D. W. Washburn," and arguably the desperately-trendy psychedelia of "The Porpoise Song."
But my all-time favorite Monkees oddity is this track from More of the Monkees; "Your Auntie Grizelda" is an innocuous "romantic comedy" tune which gives us a boy trying to convince a girl to break away from the soul-crushing influence of her nefarious martinet aunt, almost inevitably named Grizelda. It's almost capsized by some overwrought beatboxing and lip-vibrating on the part of Mike Nesmith, but the maniacal piano-and-drum section that makes up most of the instrumental track keeps things crashing forward in a way that slips past "endearingly goofy" into "demented." Somewhere halfway through the song some sorta-searing electric guitar work starts wriggling its way in, which only adds to the chaos. Plus, the lyrics are plainly and painfully forced to fit the rhythm, providing such weird phrasings as "She says she knows my kind / your Auntie Grizelda / she says she knows my kind she might maybe so" and "I know she's having a fit / she doesn't like me a bit / no bird of grace ever lit on Auntie Grizelda."(2) All this gives "Your Auntie Grizelda" a nice stamp of uniqueness, and I recommend it strongly.
1 - While "Goin' Down" is obviously an exercise in swingy jazz scat, I've long favored the charitable interpretation that what we have here is actually an exceedingly early and highly innovative step into the world of hip-hop. It's a lot of fun to go around shortening this claim to "Mickey Dolenz invented rapping" and seeing what kind of reactions you get.
2 - Of course, crammed-in and poorly-phrased lyrics were par for the course with this band...the very next song on More of the Monkees, "(I'm Not Your) Stepping Stone" features the blown, mumbled line "You've been awful careful 'bout the friends you choose / but you won't find my name in your book of the Who's Who's."
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