Thursday, March 08, 2007

One Random Ten, One Not.

"The Song Is Called What?" Edition

1. “Enjoy,” Bjork
2. “Race for the Prize,” Flaming Lips
3. “Outta Mind (Outta Sight),” Wilco
4. “I Just Want to Have Something to Do,” Ramones
5. “Mama, Won’t You Keep Those Castles in the Air and Burning?” Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
6. “The Yip Song,” Robin Hitchcock and the Egyptians
7. “Please Don’t Go,” Floyd Dixon
8. “Compliments,” Bloc Party
9. “Art Crisis,” Bob Mould
10. “Hotel Illness,” Black Crowes

I admit to a weakness to pretentiously long song titles. There’s an element of too too precious weeniedom in naming your group Clap Your Hands, Say Yeah, much less dropping an eleven-word song title on your audience. Some might find it off-putting, but for reasons unexplainable, I’m in.

Also, I like impossibly minimalist titles which are the métier of Bjork among others, but they aren’t as much fun to collect.

I ran through the catalogue on my computer and culled an extra 10 unnecessarily long song titles. We seem to be in something of a heyday for paragraphs standing in for titles, but if my collection is any indication they first appeared on the scene in the late Sixties (no surprise there.) If you have a favorite, drop it in comments. Bonus points if the title relates in no discernable way to the subject matter of the song.

1. “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” Bob Dylan
2. “The Modern Adventures of Plato, Diogenes and Freud,” Blood, Sweat and Tears
3. “Woody and Dutch on the Slow Train to Peking,” Ricky Lee Jones.
4. “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” REM
5. “The Sky Is a Poisonous Garden,” Concrete Blonde
6. “The Chome Plated Megaphone of Destiny,” Mothers of Invention
7. “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos,” Public Enemy
8. “So Tonight that I Might See,” Mazzy Star
9. “That’s When I Reach for My Revolver,” Mission of Burma
10. “You Probably Couldn’t See for the Lights but You Were Looking Straight at Me.,” Arctic Monkeys

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

How about Paul Simon's

A Simple Desultory Phillipic
(or how I was Lyndon Johnsoned into submission)

Scott Piepho said...

I like it, H.L.

Unknown said...

What about "Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey" by the Beatles?

There's also "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man" by Prince

k-pho said...

Hmm, long song names and bonus points if they have nothing to do with the song subject? If anyone was unaware that you're a Dylan fan, they know now...

The first one I thought of was kind of obscure The Decemberists' B-side "Everything I try to do, nothing seems to turn out right"

Of course 2/3 of the song titles on Sufjan Stevens Illinois fit, so I'll just pick one of the better ones (songs that is): "The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades is out to get us".

Anonymous said...

Just for the record, the longest title is Hoagy Carmichael's:

"I'm a Cranky Old Yank, in a Clanky Old Tank, on the Streets of Yokahama with My Honolulu Mama, Doing Those Beat-o, Beat-o, Flat on My Seat-o, Hirohito Blues."