Many songs haunt me for days on end. But they are not classics like “A Horse With No Name” and the wrongly maligned “MacArthur Park.” But if one of those songs haunts you for the rest of the evening: you’re welcome! I am different. I normally get television commercials stuck in my head. This makes perfect sense, of course. I suspect that I have heard certain commercial jingles far more than I’ve heard any proper song.
So this last day and a half, I have had the Crave cat food jingle going through my mind. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find the entire song with the lyrics, “My kitty cat craves chicken; my kitty cat craves milk; my kitty cat craves tuna; so my kitty cat craves crave.” You have to be some kind of crazy to write lyrics like that. But it’s been over three decades and I still remember them. So it’s some kind of brilliant too.
Listen, if you dare!
Afterword
For the truly brave, here’s “A Horse With No Name.” Note that Neil Young is not singing!
And “MacArthur Park” from the days when metaphor didn’t embarrass Americans:
And while I’m on the subject, the reason that “A Horse With No Name” sucks so badly is that it pretends to be a metaphor but is, in fact, just meaningless. Of course, that is just perfect for the band that toured apartheid South Africa because, “We have a lot of fans there.”
I am way too young to remember that jingle.
I do remember “A Horse With No Name” but for me, it is more like “Jurassic Park” instead of “MacArthur Park.”
Bonus is that the video is in CLAYMATION!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gh4zvQfDhi0
Yankovic will always be this kid who sent in tapes to Dr Demento. It still kind of amazes me that he eventually became a “real” musician. Not that he wasn’t always hugely talented.
He found a niche that he matched and he was really the only parody artist for a very long time.
More that he created a niche — not that there aren’t always humorous songwriters.