Quick, before it makes sense!

[imomus]

I'm writing a song right now, and I thought it might be interesting to show it here in its completely unfocussed state. I have no idea what it's going to become at this point, and in a way this is the moment I love the most, when everything is molten and fluid and it could go anywhere. There are several little themes that I've been wanting to write about, and they're all jostling about, uncertain of how or whether to combine.

Theme 1: A Panda Who Just Wants To Be A Dog. This relates to my pluricide theme. The pandas just want to be dogs. The unique don't actually want to be unique. It's too tragic, too much hard work, too lonely. Endangered species aren't too bothered about surviving, they just want to lie back all flabby and munch bamboo like the giant panda I saw at Berlin zoo a few months ago. He didn't seem to know or care that he was one of the last of his kind. Just wanted to munch away, like a domestic pet. Happy to be someone's dog rather than an ambassador of 'the disappearing Other'.

Theme 2: The Party Was Fucked Up. I want to write about a really fucked up party, sort of exaggerating and satirizing people's accounts of parties that get raided by the police, make their heads hurt, were 'really fucked up' and so on. I kind of hate how people glamourize self-destructive behaviour.

Theme 3: A Japanese Garden in a Perspex Cube. I love the idea of a miniature utopia that people could crawl into to escape the toxic world around them. No matter how dark it is outside, in there a tiny sun shines down on moss and birds sing. I want to oppose the sensuality of a Japanese garden or an Indian erotic miniature to the destructiveness of some gothy party where everyone has tattoos and syringes. So I want this micro-erotic landscape cube to be near the party, up on the roof. You can crawl away from the decadence and refresh yourself in there. Of course, the danger is that the cube is just another drug. It's just a visualisation of the well-being you feel when you take that capsule someone gave you. You're not really up on the roof at all.

At the moment the music is 'Greensleeves' with the melody altered. It's running back and forth in the sequencer like a sleeve through a sewing machine. The lyrics are just themed scribbles, things I found and jotted down, or invented. Here they are, before they make sense and hang together:

Notes for the Song

It is a kind of contradictive relatedness which counts: 'High and low sounds make a melody' Heraclitus said

Make a garden song: sing the names of the flowers and plants, in clusters.

Giants, dolls, curious effigies, but also animals, dragons, serpents, fish and birds; and - quite unexpectedly - sacred artificial trees

Sacred Artificial Tree

rice planting dance
Snow festival

Always be prepared
For the arrival of a bear

a 'warp and woof' a weave of syncretism and separateness. 'In traditional Japanese religion, Shinto-Buddhist syncretism and Shinto-Buddhist separation form the warp and woof of an intricate weave.'

Monday in the African Media Village
Women are scratching my back and making me / dream

The past is sad, the present worse, but at least we have no future.

Spooky Girls
The world is full of spooky girls
Shuffling around in untied blue basketball boots

a famous line uttered by the sociopathic Roman emperor Caligula, "Oderint dum metuant" (Let them hate as long as they fear)

Mike and Debbie

Olefatisfaction
The smell of things

'I'm going to rape you.'
'Okay.'
'No, don't say okay!'
'Okay'.

A panda who wants to be a dog

'I found myself cutting my story short to explain to someone that I'd turned into a deer sometime last weekend. Laughed.'

The world in a perspex cube

Eat your vegetables and vitamins and don't be such a fool

To live and die for young animals

'My love is like' song Indian strings, Miniature Chinese

In praise of shadows

Cheerful greeting to a pine tree (Japanese children)

Flowery photography (nocturnal by flash)
Tropical nocturne

Moss gardens and fungus

Pinus japonicus

sempreverde

The party was fucked up
Black boy shooting spunk across a white girl's arm

But on the roof there was a Japanese garden in a perspex cube
I crawled in through a rubber tube
Tiny sunshine and a flock of birds
Pinus Japonicus

What do you mean, the roof?
You haven't moved
I put a drug in your drink

'all these moments will be lost
like tears in water polo'

the piss from under the toilet door was flowing into the kitchen
the music was so loud i couldn't hear my ears ringing
some tattooed slut singing

A panda who wanted to be a dog
Went to a party and got so drunk

What in the world is wrong with the world
Nobody wants to be astronauts

And the pandas just want to be dogs

A Japanese pine in a perspex cube
Gothic Lolitas eat babyfood
Black boys on bicycles sell qualudes
Take one or else you're a pansy

The past is appalling, the present worse
Thank heaven we haven't a future

CHORUS
Fiddle me blank, fiddle me blind
All the young girls, losing their minds
Mike and Debbie are selling drugs
And the pandas just want to be dogs

Blow the man down, take the white line
We might all be wrong, all of the time
Mike and Debbie are shopping in sales
I'm in the Japanese garden

Mike and Debbie are trimming the sails
I'm in the Japanese garden

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

what about taking some out again?

While I've been sleeping, a mass of really interesting material has accumulated here. It really is fascinating to see the song going in so many different and unexpected directions in your (brilliant) minds. There's not one perspex box on the roof, but many, belonging to each one of you.

In fact I have a (fairly) finished lyric now, and a lot has disappeared from the song. The pandas are gone, for a start. It now seems to be a commercial for a soma-like drug called Sempreverde, which is the Italian for 'evergreen', the class which includes pine trees. (But 'pine trees' are not used up; I still want to do a separate song, a cheerful children's tribute to a pine.)

Sempreverde, like valium or ecstasy, makes you feel fine however little your surroundings or circumstances warrant it, which I think is exactly the problem with drugs: their severance from motive, from rationale. One has literally 'lost the plot' on drugs, because one's euphoria comes from nowhere and is connected to nothing, to no story.

Anyway, the song has become a sinister commercial (in the form of a sea shanty) for an escape drug, endorsed by the government and big business as an alternative to sorting out the actual problems of the world. A 'perception fix' rather than a 'problem fix'. 'Spin' voluntarily ingested. I want a robot voice to sing it rather than my own voice. The basic chord pattern still follows 'Greensleeves', but now, with the way the melody works I keep thinking of Brel's 'Amsterdam' too. Perhaps I've discovered a secret link between those songs, an instance of cryptomnesia linking Brel to King Henry VIII.

No doubt the song and final lyrics will appear here when finished. You've been as generous with your donations as with your ideas, and I want to keep posting stuff.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Here's what I have. Actually, something else that was in my mind was Leonard Cohen's 'One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong' (http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/ONE-OF-US-CANNOT-BE-WRONG-lyrics-Leonard-Cohen/3FCCB8CBABD9607548256AF00025C620). The way the repetitive, simple and almost medieval melody is offset by a kind of developing nihilistic surreal craziness which is both funny and creepy.

Sempreverde

The man from the north enters the tube
Wriggles his way to the perspex cube
The man from the south dissolves in his mouth
A lozenge of Sempreverde

The man from the north and the man from the south
One by the brain, one by the mouth
Climb through the tube into the cube
Of the perspex Japanese garden

And in the pines a tiny sun shines
Birds small as insects fly through the air
The panda unzips the skin of a pig
Flops himself down in the vibro chair

Ellen drinks heroin through a blue straw
I'm getting methedrine from some whore
An eye on her tits, Otto the Dix
Must itch to get into the garden

Fiddle me blank, fiddle me blind
All the young girls fiddle their minds
Jilly and Debbie and everyone's here
All for the Sempreverde

Giants and fairies and strange effigies
Sacred and artificial trees
Dragons and serpents and fish and birds
In the perspex Japanese garden

Otto the rich, Otto the poor
Spilling the stuff on the party floor
The past is so sad, and the present is worse
But at least we have no future

The world fills with trash and eskimo ash
Clouds of white gas floating in from the past
Crawl to the cashpoint and bring me the cash
And I'll get you the Sempreverde

I said 'I'm going to rape you'
She said okay
I said 'Don't say okay because then it's not rape'
She said 'Okay, I won't say okay'
After two tabs of Sempreverde

'Evergreen Sempreverde
Take a whole holiday or a half holiday
With Sempreverde
The tiny Japanese garden you can carry... in your pocket!'

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Oh, and the little commercial at the end sort of fades in and out on a completely different tune. I was DJing at the weekend (at a fairly fucked up party, jamming with Mario (http://www.livejournal.com/users/mariocanario/) and Anne (http://www.livejournal.com/users/alaplantine/)) and made two discoveries from my mp3 collection that I've used in this song: first, that a particular piece by Pauline Oliveros works like MSG to make any piece of music sound better, and second that the weird sci-fi commercials on Sudden Sway (http://timewasting.net/articles/suddensway.html)'s album 'Spacemate' are brilliant. (Thanks to Rhodri (http://www.livejournal.com/users/rhodri/) for the burn on this impossibly rare album!)

Evergreen, it lasts forever...

[(Anonymous)]

Amazing! The end result is nothing that any of us dreamed, and yet so much more. Brilliant how you took all those little potsherds you had at the beginning, collected a few more, threw most of them away, and then pieced together this fine piece of late-period Momus. Well done--and I can't wait to hear it.

Re: Evergreen, it lasts forever...

[(Anonymous)]

I forgot to mention Pauline Oliveros... she's an old favorite of mine, and in fact the other day I just listened to all of her albums that I have in a row. One thing I'll always remember that she said, which I read when I was about 14, and which even then whole-heartedly agreed with: "As a child I was always more fascinated with the shortwave sounds between radio stations than with the music itself." (An inelegant paraphrase.) Whether in a well or in a bog, she always lulls me.