When The Boy was a boy*, he did not know that nursery rhymes and fairy tales and folk songs had already lived lives stretching back centuries. When The Boy was a boy, he imagined that each story, verse, and tune had been crafted just for him and for people like him, all within the last few years. To honor such generous gifts of craftsmanship and art, he took them in, absorbed them, never forgot them. And he did the same with other stories and songs he learned then, because he did not know the difference between a profound message from the deep past and a superficial message from yesterday.
When The Boy was no longer a boy, he knew these things. But by then it was too late; he had memorized them all, equally, the new with the old and the silly with the deep. And long after The Boy was a boy, they would chew their way out of the recesses of his mind, laying claim to his awareness when he really needed to be thinking of other things…
When The Boy was a boy, true, he sometimes wondered about the songs they learned in music class. As printed in the music books, these songs featured black-and-white cross-hatched woodcut drawings taken from ancient sources, perhaps as far back as the eighteenth century. One drawing in particular entranced him: it depicted a raucous sort of restaurant — perhaps something like a diner, furnished in oak instead of chrome — were many people were eating and laughing; they poured huge mugs of something into their mouths, and one arm of each man encircled the waist of a wench…
Many, many songs and stories came to The Boy, when he was a boy, through the small, glowing gray screen in the living room. Many of these songs and stories were brief, lasting either thirty or sixty seconds — exactly — but some were a little longer. They showed up in venues like the beginning and end of each program. And they showed up within some of the programs themselves, like… Captain Kangaroo.
(When The Boy was no longer a boy, he came to believe that the first time he heard that song must have been the moment his politics became set for life. Good old Captain.)
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* Hat tip to Peter Handke’s poem “Song of Childhood,” featured in the marvelously hypnotic voiceover for Wings of Desire. Here’s Rutger Hauer’s voice reading the English translation, over a short film crafted especially to capture the poem’s essence:
marta says
I recently had a dream about giant rampaging teddy bears…so the Teddy Bear Picnic song caught my attention. The public radio station here as played it before, though a long time ago.
And good ol’ Malvina! I’ve got the Pete Seeger version.
Liked the Song of Childhood film. I’m going to go watch it again now.
Froog says
I dimly recall the poem from Wings of Desire, but I don’t think I’d ever heard that song before. Remarkable how these things can pass you by for so long!
In retrospect, you see this as a possibly seminal influence on your worldview; but do you have any idea what you actually felt on first hearing it? How old were you? Would it have been completely beyond your comprehension, just a weird little ‘nonsense song’ with a nursery rhyme sort of tune? I suspect it might only have been years later that it began to dawn on you how depressing it was.
I love that Tom Lehrer supposedly once called it “the most sanctimonious song ever written”.
s.o.m.e.one's brudder says
I’ve wondered how Richard Thompson could have excluded ANY of these items from his seminal work: 1000 Years of Popular Music
http://www.richardthompson-music.com/album.asp?id=90
Be sure to read his notes on the bottom of the page on the origin of this project. What a hoot! If you’re otherwise not familiar with him, please do browse the rest of his works and look him up. A pleasantly twisted yaw between depressing and joyful music catalog. His version of “Oops, I Did It Again” is especially delightful, as is “I Agree With Pat Metheny” (did I ever send that to you? I certainly meant to…).
John says
marta: giant rampaging teddy bears. Hmm. I wish I could yawn and say, “Oh, that again!” But no — I doubt that many people in history have ever strung that phrase together, in English or any other language.
John says
Froog: I don’t remember how old I was when I first experienced “Little Boxes.” On the Captain Kangaroo show, it was accompanied by a short film — an animation, of little houses and people cut out of construction paper. “Little Boxes” itself was written in 1962, so my guess is that I would have been in the living room reading — or just passing through — while The Younger Brother was watching. Thereafter, I don’t think I ever heard it again, until…
I majored in communications in college, and one of the courses I took had to do with (among other subjects) pop culture and the shaping of popular opinion. In a unit on music, the textbook reprinted the lyrics to “Little Boxes” — and the little film jumped immediately back into my head. I couldn’t get over how I’d misread the “meaning,” which, as you suggest, doesn’t exactly hide in the shadows.
(I think I’d just thought it as a little latter-day children’s singalong song about a funny town. The houses are made of ticky-tacky! Isn’t that adorable?!?)
I’ll take Tom Lehrer’s point about obviousness. But given his own body of work, which I very much admire, his claim of Malvina Reynold’s song’s sanctimony sort of clangs hollowly in my head. By its nature, all satire is sanctimonious, a bit holier-(and-probably-smarter-)than-thou. Satire’s readers/listeners are then left to themselves to sort out whether to take umbrage, or to join the satirist in a show of self-congratulation.
I love and laugh at satire in just about all forms and media. But in retrospect (a place where I probably spend way too much time), I sometimes wince at this automatic response in myself; it doesn’t matter that it was automatic, only that I’ve found someone else wanting in a way that I imagine I am not.
(Heh. On re-reading, this is something of a sanctimonious comment of mine!)
John says
brudder: You have indeed shared Thompson’s “Oops…!” with me.
I think I’ve heard of that “top songs of the millennium” list before. (The link you included isn’t working for me; I found it here instead, with commentary on the songs here.) “Oops…!,” amusingly, is at #19. :)
cynth says
Did you ever hear that the song, “Little Boxes” was supposed to be about the Levittown development, first in PA then in NJ (later to become Willingboro). I heard that somewhere…and it made sense based on the way the town was planned, laid out and well, the by-products of same.