She used to work in a diner
Never saw a woman look finer
I used to order just to watch her float across the floor
She grew up in a small town
Never put her roots down
Daddy always kept movin', So she did too.
Neil Young Unknown Legend
A police car and a screaming siren
Pneumatic drill and ripped up concrete
A baby wailing, a stray dog howling
The screech of brakes and lamplights blinking
That’s entertainment, that’s entertainment
The Jam That's Entertainment
This evening it had been my intention to bring myself and my reader up to date with family news, until I was waylaid by YouTube (sic transit...). The rot, in point of fact, had set in much earlier in the day when I pulled out two cds at random from my collection at work—Friday is my non-teaching day btw—to see if they really sounded better than the so-called 'lossless compression' that is an iTunes AAC file (They do, though only 75% good as vinyl, even with a dull pick-up cartridge and a scithy of scratches). If you don't really care about such things—or indeed, if you really don't care—I spend my time trying to explain the difference—the other thing to mention is the song quality. This arbitrary sampling juxtapposed two sets of fairly banal lyrics: the first track on Neil Young's Harvest Moon album, and (perhaps) the best-known song on The Jam's greatest hits album. On the face of it, before you hear the music, there's not much to distinguish the two, though I suspect even an elementary-school class of bored 6 year-olds could come up with a less excruciatingly unimaginative rhyme than diner/finer. Once the music—mitsamt arrangement and attitude—is added however, the quality gap between the two widens so fast that by the 12th bar any attempt at comparison becomes futile: Prius meets Lamborghini, to draw an uncontentious analogy. As Neil Young's vocals and musical arrangement mop an already insipid ditty into a tepid puddle, Paul Weller's attack boots the song up into another league. As someone who wrote out the guitar tabs for TE noted:
In fact, the Gm is more of a Gm7 that resolves to Gm (in tune with the la-la-la-la-las), but it's a pig to play that and sing the words (which don't really scan properly) at the same time, so I don't bother. It sounds okayWhich is just the point: if it rhymed or scanned properly—if it wasn't "a pig to play that and sing the words at the same time"—it wouldn't be half as effective: it's the harshness of the fit (and the Gm7) that is so evocative.
Having mixed enough metaphors for one night, I'll end with some of the funniest lines from a man who knows better than most how to mix obvious rhymes cleverly, Billy Bragg:
Sometimes when we're as close as this
It's like we're in a dream
How can you lie there and think of England
When you don't even know who's in the team?
I promise to get to family news before the end of the month/Justin's birthday!
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