33 rebellions per minute
"One thing Shakespeare never said is 'You've got to be kidding'"
© 1997 bokonin@hotmail.com
1988
Robyn Hitchcock, GLOBE OF FROGS
I quote so extensively from album lyrics for at least 3 reasons. One, duh, I care about lyrics and want to help those likeminded. Two, I think it's fun, and you try spending your first 20 years in a small northern city where people drive a hundred miles to visit your mall, and see how stunted _your_ idea of fun gets. Three, though, is a simple awareness that it's not fair asking you to trust my analytic judgments, judgee unseen. Lyrics I think are great often strike other people as much too involuted (Loud Family: "We're fighting smiling Irish, they say we look good in uniform, and mais oui! So good you couldn't pry the cold dead fingers of the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders free") or preachy (Count Zero: "This song I wrote might be my ticket out of here/ the only thing anyone else might ever hear/ and it might work, so I guess I'd better be sincere/ and try to raise someone's consciousness one tier") or ambiguous (Dead Kennedys: "Too drunk to fuck! Too drunk to fuck! Too drunk. To fuck. Too drunk, too drunk, too drunk, too drunk to fuck!"). And more than any other example, you have a right to demand evidence when I claim that GLOBE OF FROGS contains the best romantic, and also some of the best troubled-romance, songs I know.
Admittedly it helps to _hear_ "Globe Of Frogs"--- the soft propulsion of the Indian drum, Robyn's expressive croon--- but I credit the words themselves as a marvelous love letter: "And when she feeds the flowers up they rise their pretty little heads/ and when she waters them they glow and smirk and smile in their beds/ and in a globe of frogs we're making love and looking on/ and in a globe of frogs we're making love and moving on (I want you)", a love letter that also extends to the fish she feeds that "perk up and nibble on her thumb", the houses that "close their doors and dream of her", and himself in the role of "a disembodied soul seeking incarnation/ information". Why the repeated "globe of frogs" imagery? Why "Mrs Watson, all your children have been certified insane"? Well, why not? Similarly stunning is "Chinese Bones" (drum kit, a bit of guitar, a lovely shimmering 3-note keyboard hook) that treats "I met an interesting dwarf and I told him a story" with the same weight and earnestness as "The line between us is so thin I might as well be you/ and everywhere I've ever been, I know you're going too". He plays things straight for the dark, roiling rock of "The Shapes Between Us Turn To Animals" (non-obvious but reasonable animal metaphors for a fight-blackened romance), but goes the opposite way for the joyfully repetitive riffing and rhyming of "Sleeping With Your Devil's Mask", a lust song whose straightest explanatory line is half of "It's all compulsion, there's no choice/ my mother's second name is Joyce". Add in the cocky sing-speak of "Tropical Flesh Mandala", the sensible but selfish relationship song "Flesh Number One (Beatle Denis)", and the heavenly pop hit "Balloon Man", and it adds up to Hitchcock's best album, and by-the-by, a probable good source item for guys making flirtatious mix tapes (a custom I know of, not practice; if I really thought mix tapes were proof of good romance, I'd have to abandon heterosexuality and move to Virginia or Chicago to chase after married guys, and I don't quite see who benefits). Because frankly, any girl who doesn't understand why "Globe Of Frogs" should make her swoon, is not a girl worth the effort. Unless you didn't get that either.
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