Prisencolinensinainciusol
In the ‘70s, an Italian musician wrote a song in which the lyrics are a slurry of vaguely-English-sounding phonemes sung in a vaguely-English-sounding patter. He did this to make fun of the Italian public for its habit of buying anything that sounded English. It’s a banger. Every few years the song goes mini-viral and it reminds me that Americans know basically as much about non-English-speaking Euro-pop as we do about Afro-pop or Middle Eastern pop, possibly less.
Another piece of music that you occasionally hear about, and that has a similar function in my life — ah, yes, Europe, I suppose Europe must have once had “radios” — is the album 666 by Aphrodite’s Child. I know about this record for two reasons: 1) Jeff Tweedy of Wilco likes it. 2) Its cover is prominently displayed in the background during the lecture portions of Hell’s Bells, a classic fundamentalist anti-rock “documentary” as visual evidence of just how much Rock hates God. The fundies were always seizing on incredibly obscure records to make this point. The Coven album where a huge Satan is just kind of chilling out playing a fiddle is often there, and the Celtic Frost album where a demon is using a crucifix as a slingshot. That one does honestly piss me off. The guy dies for you and this album cover is your response? Fuck off. But the point is, almost nobody in America bought those, and almost nobody in America bought 666, which is a prog-rock opera about the Book of Revelation. (More specifically, it’s a prog-rock opera in which a group of hippies join together to watch a media spectacle/rock concert inspired by the book of revelation, during which the performer at the center of the spectacle gradually realizes the actual End Times are taking place outside. The Synecdoche, New York of rock music.) It’s a little noodly and bombastic, in the manner of prog-rock, but “Babylon” absolutely whips, and on one of the songs you can hear the great Greek actress Irene Papas attempt to simultaneously fake an orgasm and imitate the sounds of a woman in childbirth (that’s not an interpretation, that’s what she says she’s doing).
“Wokeness” and Single Moral Maps
A note frequently sounded in cultural journalism during the past few years: an insidious, all-conquering wokeness is sweeping through our institutions like hordes out of Central Asia. The victories of this “wokeness” always seem rather paltry, when you