A crack team of
antiquarians here at the fortress-like
headquarters of the World of Doctor Justice have been wrestling with the
hieroglyphics of the following philological oddity, apparently a vocal
rendition of the Phaistos Disk, and has finally managed to decrypt a fragment:
The meaning is still
uncertain, but here is a preliminary stab at phonological transcription:
Voorhees Dutched UR boy-fekt bawdy
widdis MY-eend …
Lord, what a line.
Worse, it's the refrain. And
a whom is it aimed? No normal man daydreams about his "perfect
body". Gays, maybe. (There exist straight male narcissists,
like Donald "The Donald" Trump, but even he does not imagine he has a
"perfect body", one supposes.) Yet the "you" in the
song is involved with this femme fatale Suzanne. It doesn't compute.
Another thing that has
always bothered me: "She feeds you tea and oranges, that come all
the way from China", which is meant to make us sigh. Only, you can
get perfectly good oranges from Florida or California. What's the big
deal?
Not to mention:
And
Jesus was a sailor …
Um … No. Not actually. Actually not.
His dad was a carpenter (by
“his dad” I mean -- his earth-dad,
the non-divine one of his male parents;
this non-traditional-family terminology is a bear), so probably Jesus
tried his hand at that. Simply
taking a spin on a friend’s yacht on the sea of Galilee doesn’t qualify you as
a sailor. Jeez, y’oughta read your Gospel, if you’re going to go
around singing about Jesus like that …
Why did anyone listen to
that song? Gawd, we were dumb ...
~
That said, though ... So long as your
evaluative faculties are shut down (not difficult to do, with alcohol), that
line about the "tea and oranges" is not bad.
Whatever you think of the song itself, Leonard Cohen's delivery is perfect for
the material. And it does sort of hang in the head ...
[Update 12 September 2013] We are all familiar with the “Metal-boarding” torture technique,
whereby political prisoners are forced to listen to Guns & Roses at
earsplitting volume for days on end. However, this technique does not work on teenagers,
who rather like it. (For similar
reasons, waterboarding in
ineffective against enemy penguins.)
Yet who would have guessed
that sappy music can be even more excrutiating?
Songs
by Julio Iglesias, Cat Stevens and George Harrison were used on prisoners in a
"torture soundtrack" held by the regime of Chilean dictator Augusto
Pinochet.
One shudders to think what
might have resulted, had Pinochet’s secret police managed to get their gloves
on a recording of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” !
~
These blood-chilling
developments have excited a certain amount of commentary in France as well:
Concerned readers weigh in:
torture
également pour les milliers de voyageurs du RER qui doivent supporter toutes
sortes de musiques sorties des casques d'autres voyageurs prêts à en découdre
quand on leur demande de diminuer le volume.
---
C'est presque aussi grave que les
gaz de Assad.
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Dans les dictatures les plus
extrêmes on passe du Céline DION sans monter le volume...
---
5 minutes de rap et j'avoue tout
