My Shop (work in progress!)

Friday 16 March 2007

The Perfect Me


Evil, evil song!!

I have had the guitar intro to the song The Perfect Me by Deerhoof (taken from their latest album Friend Opportunity) going round and round in my head since Wednesday!!
Billy Collins, the American poet wrote a poem about such a phenomenon about having More Than A Woman by the Bee Gees stuck in his head. "A mad fan belt of a tune" he called it. I wanted to quote the poem here in its entirety but would you believe it I couldn't find it on the whole of the bloody internet!! So you'll just have to go out and buy the book it's in - Nine Horses (or you could wait for me to bring my copy of the book and blog it next week if I remember).
If you also want to be so inflicted by a plague of Deerhoof then you can listen to it on my My Space page.
Also if anyone can tell me what time signature(s) its in I'd be very grateful. It's been a few years since I did my Music A Level and I'm a bit out of practice.
I thoroughly recommend Deerhoof though, especially live. I saw them supporting Beck and Radiohead at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last year. They're totally bonkers but very energetic performers.

10 comments:

Mutterings and Meanderings said...

Amarillo does that to me - I hear a teeny weeny bit of it and that's me for the rest of the day.

Currently I have the Kaiser Chiefs' I Can Do It Without You going round in my head.

Brom said...

I've always got something goiong round in my head, unless I'm very stressed, then it's silence!

Currently its the melodic guitar bit from the first track on Bullet for my Valentine CD "The Poison" imaginatively titled "Intro".

randomhiccup said...

I usually end up with music I hate going round my head, like stupid teenybopper stuff! Just been reading your myspace page, we have one too although we don't use it as much as we should. Jumping on the bandwagon doesn't quite sit well yet!

Karen said...

Yes Amarillo is quite evil. As is "Ruby" by the Kaiser Chiefs which I had stuck in my head for a couple days a few weeks ago.

Gill said...

This is copyright of Billy Collins so if you like it buy his book NINE HORSES because poets don't make much money!


More than a Woman
by Billy Collins

Ever since I woke up today,
a song has been playing uncontrollably
in my head--a tape looping

over the spools of the brain,
a rosary in the hands of a frenetic nun,
mad fan belt of a tune.

It must have escaped from the radio
last night on the drive home
and tunneled while I slept

from my ears to the center of my cortex.
It is a song so cloying and vapid
I won't even bother mentioning the title,

but on it plays as if I were a turntable
covered with dancing children
and their spooky pantomimes,

as if everything I had ever learned
was being slowly replaced
by its slinky chords and the puffballs of its lyrics.

It played while I watered the plant
and continued when I brought in the mail
and fanned out the letters on a table.

It repeated itself when I took a walk
and watched from a bridge
brown leaves floating in the channels of a current

In the late afternoon it seemed to fade,
but I heard it again at the restaurant
when I peered in at the lobsters

lying on the bottom of an illuminated
tank which was filled to the brim
with their copious tears.

And now at this dark window
in the middle of the night
I am beginning to think

I could be listening to music of the spheres,
the sound no one ever hears
because it as been playing forever,

only the spheres are colored pool balls,
and the music is oozing from a jukebox
whose light I can just make out through the clouds.

Gill said...

oh and those annoying tunes are sometimes called earworms I believe

Karen said...

Thanks for putting More Than A Woman up mum, the first time on the web!

Gill said...

er- I think I pinched it from somewhere else! But I did buy the book and I am sure that Billy Collins won't mind me posting it as he seemed a very nice person when I met him. I like it if other people quote my poems as long as they say where they got them from,(which they do sometimes) But then I am my own publisher anyway. BUY BILLY COLLINS BOOKS!! Buy any poetry! Really! Poets need the cash, we cannot live on absinthe alone!

Mutterings and Meanderings said...

Gill, I thought that was the point of absinthe - that you could live on it alone!

Karen said...

I now have the line "Feuer und Wasser kommt nicht zusammen" from the song "Feuer und Wasser" on the Rammstein album "Rosenrot" going round and round in my head after listening to it in mum and dad's car on the way back from Tower House. Damn you mother!