More like a spoken-word song–seemed to be the flipside of the Baz Luhrman “Sunblock” thing. I only heard a few lines, and can’t really remember anything other than the title of my OP.
Oh, yeah, it said something like “fold, spindle and mutilate everything.”
Anybody have any idea what this is? I need to print it up as my personal motto.
Sir
You are a fluke…of the universe,
You have no right to be here,
And whether you can hear it or not
The universe
Is laughing behind your back
It was a spoof of Desiderata, which was supposed to be deeply thoughtful and inspiring, but was really just over done.
That would be the Deteriorata by the National Lampoon. It’s on the ‘Radio Dinner’ LP. (which I am a proud owner of - you can touch me now.)
Oh… and at one time you could order a poster with the whole thing on it from ads in the Lampoon… not sure if you still can, though.
You can find copies of both Deteriorata and Desiderata many places online. Here’s one:
http://m2.aol.com/dkgoodman/desidrta.html
The story behind these two poems is that Desiderata was written by Max Ehrmann in 1927. At some point several decades later, the poem was printed on the cover of a church bulletin. This church was the Old Saint Paul’s Church in Baltimore. Beneath the copy of the poem it said, “Old Saint Paul’s Church, 1692.” This was just the name of the church and its date of founding and had nothing to do with the poem. Someone misunderstood this and decided that the poem had been found in the church in 1692 and was thus out of copyright. They made the poem into a poster and sold huge numbers of it. (This was in 1971.) Someone named Les Crane did a recitation of the poem on a record, and this sold well enough to reach number 8 on the Hit Parade. Eventually the estate of Max Ehrmann found out about the use of his poem and collected the royalties he was due. Later copies of the poster and the record have him credited as the author.
Later still, Tony Hendra (who you may remember as the actor who played the manager in This is Spinal Tap) wrote a parody of the poem which he called Deteriorata. He was then working as a writer for National Lampoon. National Lampoon sold a huge number of posters of this parody and a recitation on record of the parody. (According to one website, the recitation on the record was by someone named Norman Rose and the singing was by the then unknown Melissa Manchester.)
There seem to be several slightly varying versions of these poems and the stories of their origins available online, so take what I say with a grain of salt.