Flip the script around –
Autodidact
Teach me one thing
“Autodidact” by Gate 9
I learned to live of the land.
I’m autodidact…
Between the Buried and Me also has a song titled “Autodidact” but the word is not in the lyrics. So with Between Home And Serenity’s “Autodidact.” Same with Billy Corgan and “Half-Life Of An Autodidact.” “Half-life” has to be unusual too. He also uses “Fleur-de-lis” and “noblesse oblige.”
“Synchroncity” is a champ here.
A connecting principle
Linked to the invisible
Almost imperceptible
Something inexpressible
Science insusceptible
Logic so inflexible
Causally connectible
Nothing is invincible
[Verse 1]
(Dibromochloropane, cholorinated benzenes)
I went walking in the wasted city
(Two, nitropropane, pentrochlorophenol)
Started thinking about entropy
(Benzotricholoride, strontium chromate)
Smelled the wind from the ruined river
(One, two, dibromo, three, chloropropane)
Went home to watch TV
All the chemicals sung in the background are carcinogens. The carcinogen that actually killed Zevon is not listed. He died from Mesothelioma, probably from asbestos in his childhood attic.
Wings song, “Getting Closer” Say You Don’t Love Him, My Salamander.
Salamander isn’t particularly unusual, but using it in a pop song is weird.
McCartney’s hubris assumed that would tickle us and endear us to the lyric, but I would expect it to derail the listener “What? Salamander? She’s a salamander, why… is she ugly???”
Oh lordy, I had totally forgotten about that song. Even as kids we thought that was the weirdest / stupidest.
One that sort of fits is Anna Molly by Incubus. I think they’re trying to cleverly use it as a girl’s name that also sounds like “anomaly”. Get it?
Except Anna Molly isn’t really a name you would normally hear and the way the singer phrases it doesn’t sound like a name or the word “anamaly”
According to Dolenz, the song was written about a party that the Beatles threw for the Monkees at the Speakeasy nightclub in London. There are references in the song to the Beatles (“the four kings of EMI”) and to other party attendees such as Cass Elliot of the Mamas & the Papas (“the girl in yellow dress”)[1] and Dolenz’s future wife, Top of the Pops “disc girl” Samantha Juste (“She’s a wonderful lady”), (“the being known as Wonder Girl”).[2] The verses and chorus do not relate to each other, with the verses whimsically describing the party and the chorus consisting of Dolenz screaming bigoted remarks at an unseen, long-haired youth. The phrase “Randy Scouse Git” in Britain directly translated to, according to Dolenz, “horny, Liverpudlian jerk”,[3] was taken from the 1960s British sitcomTill Death Us Do Part , in which it was regularly used, by the loud-mouthed main character Alf Garnett, played by Cockney actor Warren Mitchell, to insult his Liverpudlian (“Scouse”) son-in-law, played by Tony Booth. The show was later adapted into the American sitcom All in the Family , in which the writers replaced the phrase in American scripts with the epithet “Meathead”. RCA Records in England told the band that they would not release the song unless it was given an “alternate title” (though, in British English, they may have used the word “alternative”). By his own account, Dolenz said “OK, ‘Alternate Title’ it is”.[3]
The song is played by all four Monkees with Dolenz on vocals, drums and timpani, Davy Jones on backing vocals, Mike Nesmith on guitar, Peter Tork on piano and organ, and producer Chip Douglas (The Turtles) on bass guitar.
Dolenz reprises lyrics from the song in “Love’s What I Want”, a bonus track to the 2016 Monkees album Good Times! (“Why don’t you be like me? Why don’t you stop and see? Why don’t you hate who I hate kill who I kill to be free?”).
The first two songs that came to my mind were Al Stewart’s “Year of the Cat” and The Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin.” Both are pure poetry, set to music.
On a morning from a Bogart movie In a country where they turn back time You go strolling through the crowd like Peter Lorre Contemplating a crime She comes out of the sun in a silk dress running Like a watercolor in the rain…
While she looks at you so cooly And her eyes shine like the moon in the sea She comes in incense and patchouli
So you take her, to find what’s waiting inside
The year of the cat.
Breathe deep the gathering gloom
Watch lights fade from every room
Bed sitter people look back and lament
Another days useless energy spent
Impassioned lovers wrestle as one…
Cold-hearted orb that rules the night
Removes the colors from our sight
Red is gray and yellow white
But we decide which is right
And which is an illusion
Her hair is Harlow gold
Her lips a sweet surprise
Her hands are never cold
She’s got Bette Davis eyes
She’ll turn her music on you
You won’t have to think twice
She’s pure as New York snow
She got Bette Davis eyes
And she’ll tease you, she’ll unease you
All the better just to please you
She’s precocious, and she knows just what it
Takes to make a pro blush
She got Greta Garbo’s standoff sighs, she’s got Bette Davis eyes …
The Police’s “Wrapped Around Your Finger” starts with the lyrics:
You consider me the young apprentice
Caught between the Scylla and Charibdes
Hypnotized by you if I should linger
Staring at the ring around your finger
The the Scylla and Charibdes were sea monsters in the Greek mythology and “Caught between the Scylla and Charibdes” came to mean something like caught between a rock and a hard place.
This is certainly the only use of this element of Greek mythos in pop music, and one of the few references to any part of Classical culture.
I always thought the band Seven Mary Three using the word 'Cumbersome" in a song, not just as a one-off word in a verse, but as the key word in the chorus and the title of the song itself, was a bold choice.
The word ‘cumbersome’ is itself cumbersome-- its consonant-heavy 3 syllables trip and stagger off the tongue clumsily.
