the Masochism Tango (An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer, 1959) ... played on the accordion!

Описание: As someone whose first records were "Weird" Al's second and third albums, I must harbour a a certain studied appreciation, if not necessarily enjoyment, for the somewhat unevenly rewarding decades of musical humour informing the Doctor Demento milieu from which he emerged, on steroids, to rip it a new laugh hole. But though they come across as fun, funny songs aren't easy: where they give people two different dimensions by which to potentially appreciate your composition, it also gives you two different fronts through which your failings can be exposed. And coming up with genuinely funny content on demand, as needed, in response to a given situation, is a feat so challenging in the long run virtually no one is able to keep it up sustainably, even when music is out of the picture. I've always cultivated a humorous aspect to my musical practice, but rather than the straightforward pitching of jokes I've navigated to the uneasy territory of achieving cognitive dissonance through absurd juxtaposition: my sets are funny in the way that a kid wearing your reading glasses might say "everything looks funny." (Everything IS funny, kid, you just need to be looking at it through the right lens.)

This here is a seasonally passionate song tossed off by someone who made musical comedy look so easy it almost came across as contemptuous, who then doubled down on the contempt by walking away from consistent success in the highly competitive sphere in favour of a comfortable career in academia. (Lest my speaking of "contempt" be taken more strongly than it is meant, of course he owed us nothing, gave us bangers for miles and, emerging from obscurity toward the end of his life, recently released his catalogue to the public domain so that future generations could appreciate and build on his work without the friction-inducing middlemen of the music industry interfering. I owed it to him to acknowledge that gesture, instead of cashing out with a lump sum for his back catalogue the way Springsteen and Dylan did.)

I probably first looked into this tune for the those-don't-go-together 2007 "Celtic Kink" Limericks-and-burlesque St. Patrick's gig I was engaged to participate in, but due to its conspicuous un-Celticness and frankly bizarre take on kinkiness, I passed. Vie did pull a couple of verses of it out of me at the afterparty to the last Tarkin album (also 2007! That's been far too long!) but I suspect that's the closest I've ever gotten to performing this song for anyone, anywhere, until now.

It's an odd song, entirely concerned with masochism yet so consistently dramatically mischaracterising it... at its essence it's a song about kink written by a vanilla person who didn't bother to do the research because they dismissively have already decided it's so silly it doesn't warrant reading even one (dirty) book on the subject. (Does that make his "Smut" a fabrication?) This comes across as more of a Muppet Show burlesque of rough foreplay, featuring dismemberent, brain-bashing, heart removal, spine fracture... my understanding is that this goes beyond what you find elapsing at your local BDSM club, navigating directly to the sexy emergency room to which the drivers in Cronenberg's Crash are whisked by erotic ambulances after deliberately mangling themselves in flaming wrecks. Tempting but I'll pass, thanks!

Anyway, it's now open season on his back catalogue (I await a deluge of hip-hop producers sampling him) but I will extend the caveat that humour doesn't all age equally gracefully and in some cases what passed for funny in the '50s just comes across as old racist (etc.) stereotypes today. While I'm sure he didn't mean anything by them, I can't endorse his catalogue without some reservations, so please don't take my enthusiasm for his work as a blanket endorsement for everything he did.