Golden Land

For the past several semesters, I’ve been teaching a course on Hollywood fiction and the Hollywood movie (films about Hollywood). The course requires students to reflect on their attitudes and assumptions about movies as a form of mass culture. Because movies are culturally ambiguous—they blur distinctions between art, entertainment, and mass communication (propaganda)—much of the writing about Hollywood has been critical of Hollywood’s detrimental impact on American life and values, often perceived both as a source of collective fantasy and as an apparatus of mass deception. According to John Parris Springer, in his fine book Hollywood Fictions: The Dream Factory in American Literature (University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), Hollywood fiction is highly critical of the influence of Hollywood and of Hollywood movies on American life and values. According to Springer, the “central cultural paradox disclosed by Hollywood fiction” is the fundamental ambivalence of Americans toward their own popular culture, their delight in, and suspicion of, the formulas of mass entertainment and their attraction to, yet distance from, the organizing ideologies and styles of mass culture. Hollywood fictions articulate deep-seated anxieties and concerns about the influence of Hollywood movies on traditional social and cultural values. Fiction critical of Hollywood emerged during the early Modernist period, which was all about self-expression (individualism). Literature shifted its focus from the social system to the individual, with society portrayed as the enemy. Hollywood fiction generally substitutes the studio system for the social system, and hence focuses on the individual’s moral battle vis-à-vis the corrupt system, Hollywood as a degrading social system that requires moral compromise in order to succeed. The features that distinguish “Hollywood fictions” from other kinds of narrative fiction are as follows:

• It has a psychological appeal: it is a literary narrative that merges 1) fascination with Hollywood as a singular and exciting “way of life” with 2) suspicion toward its moral and social influence
• Setting is transformed into character, loaded with metaphorical significance
  
• Hollywood is a “reference point” for certain social and cultural issues, a passe-partout or “pass key” to a full understanding of the values and experiences that shape America
• It is explicitly concerned with Hollywood’s moral values, the values of those who reside in the specific socio-geographical space of “Hollywood” and their influence on others.

A typical Hollywood fiction is William Faulkner’s short story “Golden Land,” published in 1935. In Faulkner’s story, Hollywood—the “Golden Land” of the title—functions as an “excessive signifier,” meaning that the location itself, the actual geographical space, has a corrosive, detrimental effect on an individual’s moral and ethical behavior. (The “excessive signifier” in a horror film is any space believed to be blighted or cursed, such as the stereotypical “haunted house.”) “Golden Land” is typically interpreted as expressing Faulkner’s disgust and dissatisfaction with Hollywood values—and by extension, consumer culture in general. The central character, Ira Ewing, is an alcoholic, the husband of a wife who has grown to hate him and the father of “Voyd,” apparently a transvestite. His daughter, April, an aspiring actress, is shockingly promiscuous. Ira’s professional success has come at the expense of his moral failure, with his ruined family used by Faulkner to symbolize the depravity and lack of traditional values found in Hollywood.

Hollywood fiction dates to the mid Teens (Springer identifies a story first serialized in Photoplay in 1916, titled “The Glory Road,” as the first Hollywood fiction, that is, a story that uses Hollywood as a means of cultural complaint). There are many famous moves about Hollywood; a few such examples include Ella Cinders (1926), What Price Hollywood? (1932), A Star Is Born (1937), Sunset Boulevard (1950), and In A Lonely Place (1950). But given that fiction critical or satirical of Hollywood emerged so early in its history, popular songs critical of Hollywood, historically considered, came rather late. I’ve listed a few of these songs below; some of them, such as the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” are rather famous. There are many other good songs not listed here, of course, but all of the songs rest upon a tradition decades old before the songs themselves were ever recorded.

Songs Of The Golden Land:
Buckcherry – For The Movies
The Clovers – Love Potion No. 9
The Doors – L. A. Woman
The Eagles – Hotel California
Guns N’ Roses – Welcome to the Jungle
The Kinks – Celluloid Heroes
The Misfits – Hollywood Babylon
Phil Ochs – The World Began in Eden But Ended in Los Angeles
Poison – Hollyweird
Stan Ridgway – Beloved Movie Star
Boz Scaggs – Hollywood
Bob Seger – Hollywood Nights
Elliott Smith – Angeles
Supertramp – Gone Hollywood

Rain

“Fantasy is a place where it rains,” writes Italy Calvino in Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Vintage, 1988). His use of “rain” is figurative, of course; our “mind’s eye” is the movie screen upon which the imagination “rains” down the images that form our fantasies. “The mental cinema is always at work in each one of us, and it always has been, even before the invention of the cinema. Nor does it ever stop projecting images before our mind’s eye” (83). Rain—the Parisian rain that announces the dissolution of love, the end of Rick and Lisa’s relationship in Casablanca, metaphorically realized by the note from Ilsa Rick reads at the train station. Rain as sadness and melancholy: the implied link between “Rainy Days and Mondays” about which the Carpenters sing. Rain as adversity, as hard times, as the bad things in life, as in James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain.”

But what about the association of rain and fantasy, poetically rendered by the image of the introspective child staring out of a window as raindrops patter against the windowpane? There are many wonderful songs about rain (e.g., Willie Nelson’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain”), but the songs on the following playlist explore the connection between rain and fantasy, fantasy as a place where it is always raining. “Rainy Night in Georgia” does not simply express melancholy, but is also about the singer’s (Brook Benton’s) visual imagination, as is one of Elvis’s last truly great songs, “Kentucky Rain.” (Rain as anxiety.) For rain as the frustration of Erotic fulfillment (the Reality Principle), go here. My favorite? The Grateful Dead’s “Box of Rain.” Why? Well, as Louis Armstrong famously said, “There are some people that if they don’t know, you can’t tell them.”

Fantasy As A Place Where It Rains:
The Beatles – Rain
Brook Benton – Rainy Night in Georgia
The Carpenters – Rainy Days and Mondays
The Cascades – Rhythm of the Rain
Eric Clapton – Let It Rain
The Cowsills – The Rain, The Park & Other Things
Creedence Clearwater Revival – Who’ll Stop the Rain?
The Doors – People Are Strange
Bob Dylan – A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
Echo & The Bunnymen – Ocean Rain
Peter Gabriel – Red Rain
The Grateful Dead – Box Of Rain
Willie Nelson – Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain
The Police – Shadows in the Rain
Eddie Rabbit – I Love A Rainy Night
Prince and The Revolution – Purple Rain
Neil Sedaka – Laughter in the Rain
James Taylor – Fire and Rain
The The – Kingdom of Rain
XTC – 1,000 Umbrellas

Déclassé

Déclassé—To be demoted from a high status or rank to a lower one, especially in social status. The word déclassé is also applied to weapons considered obsolete or antiquated. It refers to that which is no longer viable or operational. The déclassé is not “kitsch”—tawdry, overly sentimentalized art of the banal representational sort—but refers to those features of our inherited culture that make us uncomfortable. It refers to those cultural behaviors that are now obsolete, forming the basis of an unwritten protocol that silently censors and marks the limits of proper taste. It proscribes movies that cannot be made, jokes that can no longer be recited, pop songs that now seem starkly ludicrous, silly, and pretentious. The interest in cultural productions that are considered déclassé is primarily historical, that is, scholarly: they are museum pieces which Time and History have rendered quaint, but nonetheless strange, artifacts. The déclassé may once have been highly fashionable, but is no longer—it no longer “speaks” to contemporary audiences and hence is out of fashion. These things may have a nostalgic appeal, but they no longer carry the sting of truth. A recovery or revival is unlikely.

Examples Of The Déclassé (In Language Or Sentiment), Hardly Exhaustive:
Harpers Bizarre – The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy) [1960s]
The Beach Boys – Be True To Your School [1960s]
Jimmy Dean – I Won’t Go Hunting With You Jake (But, I’ll go chasin’ wimmin) [1950s]
Leroy Van Dyke – I Fell In Love With a Pony Tail [1950s]
Wayne Fontana and The Mindbenders – A Groovy Kind Of Love [1960s]
Bobby Goldsboro – Honey [1960s]
Kay Kyser and His Orchestra – The Umbrella Man [1930s]
John Lennon – Woman Is The Nigger Of The World [1970s]
Loretta Lynn – The Pill [1970s]
Glenn Miller and His Orchestra – Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree (With Anyone Else But Me) [1940s]
Joni Mitchell – Woodstock [1960s]
Wayne Newton – Dreams of the Everyday Housewife [1960s]
The Plasmatics – Metal Priestess [1980s]
Helen Reddy – I Am Woman [1970s]
SSgt. Barry Sadler – Ballad of the Green Berets [1960s]

Gramophone

The German inventor Emile Berliner patented the Gramophone in 1887. Unlike Thomas Edison, Berliner eschewed recording onto cylinders, and instead started recording onto flat disks—records. These early records were made of glass, later zinc, and eventually plastic, onto which sound information was etched into a spiral groove. The (figurative) arm of the gramophone (pictured), the playback device, contained a needle that “read” the sound vibrations in the grooves, transmitting this information to the speaker, which amplified the sounds. Berliner founded The Gramophone Company in order to manufacture both records and the technology to play them, Gramophones. Significantly, in 1908 Berliner began using Francis Barraud’s painting His Master’s Voice as his company’s logo, an image familiar to anyone who owns a few older RCA records. (The inventor eventually sold the licensing rights to his patent for the Gramophone and method of making records to the Victor Talking Machine Company, which in turn became RCA-Victor.)

I’ve always assumed that Berliner chose this now famous image as his logo in homage to Argos, Odysseus’ faithful dog. If you remember, in Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus returns home to Ithaca in the twentieth year of his absence, disguised as a beggar. Nonetheless, that remorselessly old, dying dog, which manages to keep warm only by lying on a composting manure pile, manages to recognize his master, Odysseus, when he speaks—by his master’s voice. Despite Odysseus’ disguise, despite the long absence, the keen ears of Argos can recognize his true master by the authenticating sound of his voice. Presumably, Berliner chose Berraud’s painting in order to suggest the crystal clarity of sounds etched on his records, that his records captured authentic sound.

Berliner was a very smart and clever man, and he chose to record popular singers of the day—Enrico Caruso, for instance—to help advertise his records and the Gramophone. But as Friedrich Kittler has argued, in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford UP, 1999), from around 1880 on, composers of music have been “allied with engineers” (24). After this date, he writes, “The undermining of articulateness becomes the order of the day” (24). As a consequence of sound recording, noise itself became an object of scientific research, and the previous conceptions that governed musical theory became antiquated.

The phonograph does not hear as do ears that have been trained immediately to filter voices, words, and sounds out of noise; it registers acoustic events as such. Articulateness becomes a second-order exception in a spectrum of noise. (23)

He’s right, of course: recording is a process by which sounds are made, not “captured.” It’s a form of engineering. Consider the sort of composers considered significant and important since 1887: Schoenberg, for instance, Ives, Varèse (all born in the nineteenth century), and Stockhausen (born 1928). The latter’s Kontakte owes as much to electrical engineers as it does to the redefinition of music theory that occurred when sounds (and music) became understood as sonic vibrations. I don’t think contemporary musicians who also happen to be music theorists, such as Brian Eno and Chris Cutler, would dispute Kittler’s characterization of the recording of music as an “acoustic event,” nor dispute the idea that articulateness (of voice) is “a second-order exception in a spectrum of noise.” Such is the impact of technology on our idea of (popular) music.

Some Acoustic Events:
The Beach Boys, Caroline, No [album version]
The Beatles, Revolution 9
The Doors, Horse Latitudes
Electric Light Orchestra, Telephone Line
Brian Eno, Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks [album]
King Crimson, 21st Century Schizoid Man
Pink Floyd, Money
Lou Reed, Metal Machine Music [album]
The Residents, Eskimo
The Shangri-Las, Leader of the Pack
Frank Zappa, Lumpy Gravy [album]

Mermaid, Nymph, Siren

A siren, in Greek mythology, was an assemblage or portmanteau, part bird, part woman, and was both dangerous (a “siren” to this day warns of danger, a usage derived from the siren’s song that lured men to their doom) and seductive—a prototype of the femme fatale. At least originally. In later folklore, they lost their wings, and became fully aquatic and mermaid-like (“la mer” meaning “the sea” in French, hence mermaid means “sea-maiden”), revealed by the fact that in the Spanish and French languages, for instance, the word for mermaid is respectively Sirena and Sirène. Hence sirens and mermaids are often confused in the popular imagination. In contrast, the Greek word nymph, a female spirit usually associated with a specific geographical place, has both “bride” and “veiled” among its meanings; a “nymph” has come to mean a young woman of marriageable age. Hence the words mermaid, nymph, and siren all refer to highly seductive and desirable women, although potentially dangerous: for the Victorians, a “nymphomaniac” was a fundamentally disturbed woman, revealed by her excessive interest in sex. Perhaps because of its association with the word “nymphomania,” the word “nymph” seldom occurs in the lyrics of popular music. Mermaids and sirens, however, are mythical creatures that often make appearances, figures of elusive beauty. I’m including Bobby Darin’s “Beyond the Sea” in the following playlist, primarily because it is the precursor song of Van Morrison’s “Queen of the Slipstream” (“Going away far across the sea/But I’ll be back for you/Tell you everything I know”): both are romantic songs are about nymphs, beautiful young women waiting for the return of their lovers. But both “Can't Get It Out of My Head” and “Queen of the Slipstream” are also figurations of the Muse, signaling the singer is among the poetic elect.

Mermaids, Nymphs, And Sirens:
Aeon – Nymph
Tori Amos – Siren
Tim Buckley – Song to the Siren
Cream – Tales of Brave Ulysses
Bobby Darin – Beyond the Sea
Electric Light Orchestra – Can’t Get It Out My Head
Hall and Oates – Maneater
Van Morrison – Queen of the Slipstream
Nightwish – Siren
Robert Plant – Song to the Siren
Sade – Mermaid
Shel Silverstein – Mermaid Song
XTC – Mermaid Smiled

Fire

Fire — “If we go back far enough,” Freud wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents, “we find that the first acts of civilization were the use of tools, the gaining of control over fire and the construction of dwellings. Among these, the control over fire stands out as a quite extraordinary and unexampled achievement. . . .” He theorized that the first human (male) to renounce his desire to put out a fire by micturating, “was able to carry it off with him and subdue it to his own use. By damping down the fire of his own sexual excitation, he had tamed the natural force of fire.” In other words, the first major step toward human civilization was the renunciation of instinct. Woman was put in charge of fire—the hearth—because her anatomy made it impossible to put out a fire with the phallic equivalent of a fire hose. As if to link fire and the phallus in an explicitly Freudian way, Jean-Jacques Annaud, in his film Quest For Fire (1981), included a scene a which a female performs fellatio on one of her male companions, presumably for the first time in history (although the ur-fellatrix, unlike Eve, eludes the historical record).

Hence fire is essential to civilization, and yet is also capable of destroying it: it is both fascinating and terrifying—the fire that signals the apocalypse. In the popular imagination fire is most often associated with erotic passion (“c’mon baby light my fire” Jim Morrison implores in the famous song), but when is fire more closely associated with fire in the eschatological sense—the conflagration that signals damnation, the end of the world? The Meat Puppets’ “Lake Of Fire” is once such song; Black Sabbath’s “Black Sabbath” (“Satan’s sitting there, He’s smiling/Watches those flames get higher and higher”) is another, the distant precursor of which is the Louvin Brothers’ “Are You Afraid To Die.” Bob Seger’s “Fire Lake” is a song about fire in the Freudian sense, except rather than singing of the renunciation of instinct, the song celebrates its return (return of the repressed). Johnny Cash’s version of “Ring Of Fire” is famous, but Anita Carter’s version is better—passion, yes, but passion linked with self-destruction. Beautiful self-destruction, self-sacrifice, is also explored in Blue Oyster Cult’s “Burnin’ For You.” Setting aside the banality of songs about passion, there have been some very fine songs about fire. As opposed to those who say the world will end in ice, these songs say fire.

A Few Songs About Fire, Not Ice:
Anita Carter – Ring Of Fire
Black Sabbath – Black Sabbath
Blue Oyster Cult – Burnin’ For You
Chrome – Firebomb
The Cramps – Sinners
The Crazy World of Arthur Brown – Fire
King Crimson – The Court of the Crimson King/The Return of the Fire Witch/The Return of the Puppets
Barry McGuire – Eve of Destruction
Meat Puppets – Lake of Fire
Michael Murphy – Wildfire
The Rolling Stones – Play With Fire
Bob Seger – Fire Lake
Talking Heads – Burning Down the House
James Taylor – Fire and Rain
The Marshall Tucker Band – Fire on the Mountain

Windows

“In Fritz Lang’s M,” writes Raymond Durgnat, “the child murderer (Peter Lorre) sees his next victim gazing into a shop window full of toys. He pauses by the next window, and his reflection is hemmed in by a display of serried knives. In yet another window, the movements of an attention-getting spiral and an arrow have a mesmeric, mechanical quality, like the psychological pressure pounding inside his head. Photographed as reflected in the shop window, your character is transparent to what he is gazing at—his desires and obsessions are more solid and real than he himself. . . . ” (Films and Feelings, p. 232). The urban flaneur (Baudelaire: “a person who walks the city in order to experience it”) is naturally drawn to the shop window, as shop windows theatricalize desire, framing by means of the window casing toys, clothes, fashionably dressed mannequins, glittering baubles and beads—Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the boys and girls gazing at potential gifts in A Christmas Story, the puppy about which Patti Page sings in “How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?” But windows also reveal the truth, a world freed of illusion. Perhaps the best window song is therefore George Jones’ “Window Up Above,” in which the window up above voyeuristically allows, by chance, the singer to know the truth about his marriage, and express the heartbreak that follows: perversely, the window has allowed him to see the way things actually are, his wife in the arms of her lover: the horror and fascination of gazing into the face of Medusa.

The Window And The Flaneur:
50 Cent – Window Shopper
Aphex Twin – Window Licker
The Beatles – She Came In Through The Bathroom Window
Jimi Hendrix – Blue Window
The Hollies – Look Through Any Window
George Jones – Window Up Above
Billy J. Kramer – From A Window
Metallica – Dirty Window
Patti Page – How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?
The Rays – Silhouettes
U2 – Window in the Skies
Hank Williams – Window Shopping

Under The Sea

When I was growing up, Jacques Cousteau (1910-1997) was the most famous undersea explorer in the world. I knew about him primarily through his films and TV programs, although he also wrote many books as well. He pioneered techniques used in underwater photography (he was a filmmaker as much as sea diver), exploring the world’s oceans aboard his base ship, the Calypso (eventually the subject of an homage song by John Denver). Beginning in 1968, he hosted the television series The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, a show which ran for several years, until the mid-70s. A few minutes of research on the web revealed that in 1959 he addressed the first World Oceanic Congress, which in turn led to his appearance on the March 28, 1960 cover of Time magazine. In April of 1961, he was awarded the National Geographic’s Gold Medal at a White House ceremony hosted by President John F. Kennedy. I don’t recall hearing of Jacques Cousteau before that time, but I certainly remember him from the Sixties on.

Among his very earliest films was Épaves (1945, available here), which captured the poetry of the undersea realm. The decaying wreckage of sunken ships resembles the ruins of undersea cathedrals, through which, like something from a Surrealist painting, we watch divers swim, like strange birds hovering in the air. His underwater photography captured sea creatures from all over the world, creatures rich and strange. Weird and occasionally nightmarish, they resembled things from another planet. Because of his keen sense of the delicate ecology of the ocean, he was like a crusader, a Naturalist capturing through his poetic films all the beauty, awe, and mystery of nature. His films took us out of our dreary, quotidian reality and daily routine, and provided an escape into a world serene and delicate, a pure realm uncontaminated by humans and their machines. I choose to think that Jacques Cousteau influenced popular culture as well, including its music. Most certainly songs about the sea (and songs about being under the sea) are a venerable subgenre of folk and popular music; “under the sea” songs are popular among schoolchildren as well. In the Sixties, though, songs about being under the sea were really the equivalent of a psychedelic trip, thanks to films of Jacques Cousteau. Some dream of flying, but when I was a child I dreamed of being a fish, not a bird, able to swim underwater indefinitely. One of the very earliest dreams I remember in my life was set underwater, in a vast river with a powerful current, and I was struggling to find sunken treasure. Fish swam by me lazily. Surprisingly, I saw a door on the bottom of the river, perfect in every way, so I swam for it. I reached out for the knob, pulled, opened it—and woke up, a bit like Dorothy opening the door to the world of Oz, which perhaps I had recently seen, I don’t know.

Or, perhaps my dream was influenced by those poetic and hauntingly memorable films made by Jacques Cousteau, as some of the following songs may have been as well.

Bobby Bare – The Mermaid
The Beatles – Octopus’s Garden
Jimmy Buffett – A Pirate Looks At Forty
John Denver – Calypso
Donovan – Atlantis
Jimi Hendrix – 1983… (A Merman I Should Turn To Be)
Roy Orbison – Leah
Marty Robbins – Devil Woman
Squirrel Nut Zippers – Under the Sea
The Verlaines – Cathedrals Under the Sea
Patrick Watson – Man Under the Sea
XTC – Mermaid Smiled

Trains

Trains have figured prominently in the cinema since its inception—think of the Lumière brothers’ early film, Arrivée d’un train à Perrache (1896), or Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903). If you think about it long enough and seriously enough, you’ll realize how many great films, encompassing all film genres, have had either a key sequence involving a train, or are actually set on a train—where does one begin? Many early Hollywood Westerns, Ella Cinders (1926), Laurel and Hardy’s Berth Marks (1929), Hitchock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938), Strangers on a Train (1951) and North By Northwest (1959); Fritz Lang’s Western Union (1941); Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944); Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time in the West (1969); Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch; Murder on the Orient Express (1974); Silver Streak (1976); The Cassandra Crossing (1976); Terror Train (1980); Runaway Train (1985); Atomic Train (1999), and Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited (2007). Of course, I’ve scarcely scratched the surface of the subject: one could go on and on about the fact that there’s scarcely been a bad film when set on a train. At the very least, films in which a train makes an appearance are always interesting. Try asking the question sometime at a party as a form of parlor game, and you’ll be surprised at how many titles people begin listing.

Is it any wonder, then, that Elvis, who worked as an usher in a movie theater, and who had memorized all of James Dean’s lines in Rebel Without A Cause (1955), would record “Mystery Train”? Songs about trains are as varied emotionally as the many associations with the train; as Raymond Durgnat observed, “…their whistles are cries of anger, joy, malevolence, jubilation, or, on the prairie, forlorn and lonely, or, in the blues, the consoling thought of escape” (Films and Feelings, p. 233). To which we could add, the thrill of mystery, as in Elvis’s interpretation of “Mystery Train”: I don’t know where this train his headed, but wherever it’s going, I’m staying on for the ride. Trains have had a distinguished place in popular music as well, as the following list attests. There are many lists of train songs available on the web, but here’s my playlist of choice:

A Few Train Songs:
Johnny Cash – Folsom Prison Blues
Guy Clark – Texas, 1947
Tommy Dorsey – On the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe
Duke Ellington and His Orchestra – Take the ‘A’ Train
Elvis – Mystery Train
Jimmy Forrest – Night Train
Steve Goodman – City of New Orleans
The Grateful Dead – Casey Jones
Tom T. Hall – The L & N Don’t Stop Here Anymore
Louis Jordan & His Tympany Five – Choo Choo Ch’Boogie
Gladys Knight & The Pips – Midnight Train to Georgia
Alison Krauss – Steel Rails
K. D. Lang – Ridin’ the Rails
John Mayall – Crawling Up A Hill
Jim and Jesse McReynolds – Bringin’ in the Georgia Mail
Glenn Miller and His Orchestra – Chattanooga Choo Choo (from Sun Valley Serenade, 1941)
Willie Nelson – Railroad Lady
Ozzy Osbourne – Crazy Train
Rank and File – The Conductor Wore Black
Jimmy Rogers – Same Train, Different Time
Doc Watson – Freight Train Boogie
Mary Wells – Soul Train
Hank Williams – I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry

Carnival

Although the origin of the word is contested, some suggest the word carnival is derived from the Latin carnem levare or the Italian carnelevare, “removal of meat,” thus making the carnival celebration related to religious fasting, just as Mardi Gras is to Lent. It has also been interpreted to mean “carne vale,” or “farewell to meat” in the alimentary sense, or “farewell to the flesh” in the erotic sense. “Farewell to the flesh” has been interpreted by some as referring to those festivities that encourage the letting go of your everyday self and embracing the carefree nature of the carnival or festival atmosphere—the indulgence of your hidden aspirations. Whatever the word’s origin, for theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, the carnival disrupts the rigid hierarchies that make up our quotidian life and allows for indulgence and excess. Carnival allows for a multiplicity of voices and meanings—for laughter—and allows for impulse and instinct and expressions of caprice and desire. Social roles can be cast aside, allowing us to show our “real” selves to the world. For Bakhtin, music and song create a highly flexible realm of meaning that holds socially transformative potential. Music, therefore, is essential to carnival.

Carnival Time:
The Band – Life Is A Carnival (Cahoots)
Jimmy Buffett – Carnival World (Off to See the Lizard)
The Cardigans – Carnival (Life)
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis – Carnival (The Assassination of Jesse James soundtrack)
Frank Churchill – When I See An Elephant Fly (Dumbo soundtrack)
Elvis – It’s Carnival Time (Roustabout soundtrack)
Norah Jones – Carnival Town (Feels Like Home)
Paul McCartney and Wings – Letting Go (Venus and Mars)
Natalie Merchant – Carnival (Tigerlily)
Pere Ubu – Waiting For Mary (Cloudland)
Bruce Springsteen – 4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy) (The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle)
Bruce Springsteen – The Last Carnival (Working On a Dream)
Sun Ra & His Arkestra – Pink Elephants on Parade (Stay Awake: Various Interpretations of Music from Vintage Disney Films)

Blindness

Among the vast repertoire of symbols available to the lyricists of popular music, one of the most frequently used is blindness. A famous use of blindness, in the oft-recorded “Amazing Grace”—I was blind but now I see—corresponds to the dramatic moment named by Aristotle anagnorisis, recognition, the movement from ignorance to knowledge, a moment of sudden, acute insight. Hence blindness more often figurative than it is literal, and this figurative use listeners understand without even thinking about its status as poetry. Moreover, blindness is not only, figuratively speaking, a state of ignorance, but also signals a state of crippling self-absorption or self-preoccupation, leading to selfish, insensitive behavior. However, when writing about the symbolic use of blindness in films, Raymond Durgnat observed:

Terrible as this fate is felt to be, a sentimental style easily transforms it into something almost voluptuous, a kind of graceful helplessness (Chaplin’s City Lights, 1931; Mark Robson’s Lights Out, 1951). Because of our impulsive pity, a barking, aggressive blind person, brutally rejecting it, is not only admirable (for his courage, like Rochester) but frightening, almost magical (Anna Massey’s witch-mother in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom). Blindness is, strangely enough, associated with the all-seeing eye. . . . The Peeping Tom, with his apparatus for seeing (camera, mirror) and his spiked tripod is ‘seen through’ by the blind woman. (Films and Feelings, p. 229)

Durgnat might also have included the figure of the blind woman played by Audrey Hepburn in the suspense thriller Wait Until Dark (1967). Of course, he wrote these observations some years before the 1972 debut of Kung Fu on American television as well, a series prominently featuring the blind sage, Master Po (Keye Luke), imbued with a magical, if not superhuman, power of sight, at the continual amazement of Kwai Chang Caine (David Carradine). In the western world, the model for the blind but all-seeing sage can be traced back to the poet Homer, generally considered to have been blind, then Tiresias, the blind hermaphroditic prophet of Greek mythology, then John Milton, who claimed that because the ordinary way of seeing was prohibited him, his blindness was compensated by an inner “celestial light”—hence his strong identification with the figure of the blinded Samson in his great poem, Samson Agonistes. (Samson’s figurative return was in the form of the Who’s Tommy.) But one can also be blinded by the light of sudden insight—“knocked cold,” stunned—as the Biblical story of Saul of Tarsus reveals. Struck blind, he could then see, an experience leading to his spiritual conversion by which he became the foremost Christian apologist, Paul.

Ten Songs Of The Blind and Blinded:
Tim Buckley – I Must Have Been Blind
Thomas Dolby – She Blinded Me With Science
Everlast – Blinded by the Sun
Lefty Frizzell – Blind Street Singer
Korn – Blind
Johnny Nash – I Can See Clearly Now
Bruce Springsteen – Blinded By the Light (Manfred Mann’s cover is more famous)
Talking Heads - Blind
The Who – Pinball Wizard
Johnny Winter – Blinded By Love

Musical Box

The musical box — a novelty toy that produces music mechanically. The crucial parts of a musical box are the cylinder and the comb. The cylinder is the programming device, the equivalent of the punched card used with early computers. It is studded with tiny pins at the correct spacing to produce music by displacing the teeth of the comb at the proper time. The comb is a flat piece of metal with many dozens (or possibly hundreds) of teeth of different lengths. The tines of the comb “chime,” or sound, as they slip off the pins of the cylinder. There are some musical boxes that have a flat disc rather than a cylinder, but the disc is still the equivalent of the operating program of the cylinder.

Although intricate, the musical box is merely a cold, unfeeling mechanism, yet it nonetheless has come to express nostalgia, delicacy, and lost innocence. British film critic Raymond Durgnat observed that musical boxes, like pianolas and barrel organs, hold a fascination for children, and “together with their ‘period’ feel, outweighs any adult diffidence about their banal ‘pop’ tunes and canned quality. As so often, the popular poetic sense of a symbol is derived [from] its meaning for children. The music comes from long ago and faraway, the popular tunes of yesterday have the charm of memory” (Films and Feelings, p. 231). He means that since the tunes musical boxes are frequently designed to play are gentle or sentimental ones from an earlier era (“lullabies”), they evoke a powerful sense of nostalgia—“lost innocence.”

On the other hand, the “too” sweet, saccharine blandness of musical boxes can make them overly or creepily sentimental, and their unsavory social origins (they were associated with the vice of snuff) allow them to be associated with crime as well. Durgnat uses Jean Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu [The Rules of the Game] as an example, in which an aristocrat “expresses his basic spontaneity of soul by enthusing over the latest acquisition to his collection of musical boxes: a huge elaborate Dutch street organ. But its sound acts as background to an attempted crime passionnel, as, again, in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train the carousel organ plays, ‘And the band played on . . .’ as a brutal strangling takes place” (p. 231). Hence in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, there is a sinister musical box that can induce eternal sleep when its music is played. In The Road Warrior (aka Mad Max 2), the Max character played by Mel Gibson uses a musical box to become friends with a strange, seemingly mute child referred to as the Feral Kid. A past crime is signaled by musical boxes in Sergio Leone’s For a Few Dollars More, in which a murderer betrays his identity by having a pocket watch that is also a musical box that plays a distinctive tune. In Luis Buñuel’s Ensayo de un Crimen [The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz], a musical box also plays a crucial role. An ornate musical box in the form of a monkey with Persian robes playing the cymbals is featured prominently in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera. In Japan, where musical boxes are quite popular, the Sankyo Seiki company has specialized in the manufacture of musical boxes which are extremely intricate (there is an entire “Music Box Collection” from Japan consisting of several CDs, generically referred to as “J-Pop,” available on iTunes).

Pop songs incorporating the musical box are rare, but when its used is it is often memorable. The musical box has also been used as inspiration for a few songs as well, e.g., Genesis’ “The Musical Box” from Nursery Cryme (1971). Here are a few songs inspired by the musical box, or incorporating it into the music.

Björk – Frosti
Mariah Carey – Music Box
The Charles Randolph Grean Sounde [Robert Cobert] – Josette’s Music Box [used in the TV series Dark Shadows]
Philip Glass – Music Box (“Candyman Theme”)
Genesis – The Musical Box
Korn – Dead Bodies Everywhere
Bobby McFerrin – Music Box
Panic! at the Disco – This Is Halloween [cover of the song from The Nightmare Before Christmas]
Rammstein – Spieluhr [Music Box]
Thrice – Music Box