Georges Brassens was a French singer-songwriter from roughly 1950 until his death from cancer in 1981. He was incredibly prolific but almost never performed outside France. So he isn’t as well known here as Jacques Brel even though their careers overlap almost perfectly.

He has a beautiful voice. It reminds me of Roger Whittaker. But Brassens is not pretentious about it. In fact, you don’t get the impression that he even knows what a fine voice he has. Regardless, his focus is on the music and lyrics.

Brassens was diverse in terms of his subjects, so I’d like to highlight two songs.

Le Parapluie

“Le Parapluie” (The Umbrella) is a sweet song about a man who sees a women walking in the rain. He offers her his umbrella and they fool around a bit. But the narrator seems naive like the one in Brel’s “Madeleine.” So it’s easy to see him as deluded. Maybe he’s just thrilled to be anywhere close to a woman. Regardless, she goes on her way at the end.

Brave Margot

“Brave Margot” is one of Brassens’ best-known songs. It’s funny but ultimately heart-breaking and cynical. A shepherdess finds an abandoned kitten, which she breast-feeds. Eventually, all work in the town stops because the men have come to gawk at her.

The shepherdess is naive and thinks they are just looking at the kitten. Eventually, however, the women of the town get angry and burn the kitten to death. The shepherdess gets married in her heartbreak. But the old folk continue to tell the story to new generations.

As with all great art, I don’t think there is a single meaning to this song. It’s funny and sad the way that life is.

George Brassens by Roger Pic — Bibliothèque nationale de France, Public Domain.

One of the best things about Randy Newman is that his intent is always clear. When I was 17, I got his album Sail Away. I played it endlessly. It had many of the songs I still think are among his best like “Last Night I Had a Dream,” “Political Science,” “Burn On,” and most especially, “Lonely at the Top.”

That last one was written for Frank Sinatra, and I think he missed a great opportunity to make light of himself by recording it. He would have killed it! Sadly, Sinatra had as much of a sense of humor about himself as Donald Trump.

But arguably the greatest song on the album is the title track. Its conceit is that a typical salesman is making an argument for Africans to come to America for the great life — unstated to be as a slave.

As is typical for Newman, he sprinkles in racist references like “sweet watermelon and the buckwheat cake.” And this is combined with weird ignorances like mentioning tigers, which don’t live in Africa.

The song is about more than literal slavery. It’s about the absurdity of the idea of being American. The idyllic life he describes is not just unavailable to the slaves who were kidnapped but also to the entire working class. All of these people labor so the rich can “sing about Jesus and drink wine all day.”

“It’s great to be an American.” And if we just define “American” narrowly enough, that’s true.

Sail Away Album Cover by Reprise Records under Fair use.

Over time, art loses its relevance. Today, people think of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility as a nice romance. When it was published, everyone understood that it was a critique of inheritance laws and the status of women. Additionally, its razor-sharp satire of Romantic affectation has lost its edge to the point where few notice it as anything but a comment of the follies of youth.

The same is true of Scott Walker’s song “The Old Man’s Back Again.” I recently heard the song used in the first episode of the second season of Ash vs Evil Dead. There is nothing clever about its use. Ash goes back home to Elk Grove and we get, “The old man’s back again.” (In it’s defense, the scene is really well directed with the song playing on the car radio, then switching outside showing the city sign as the car passes by and music at full volume.)

The song is off Scott 4 and is “Dedicated to the Neo-Stalinist Regime.” It is a reference to the Prague Spring where the newly elected First Secretary of the Czechoslovak communist party, Alexander Dubček, began to reform the country. He and others in the government made a lot of progress in this effort even while maintaining what they thought were good relations with the other Warsaw Pact countries.

But they were wrong and on 20 August 1968, seven and a half months after it began, the Prague Spring ended. The old policies were gradually put back in place and Dubček was forced to resign a few months later. The “old man” Walker refers to is Stalin — or at least his authoritarian policies.

It’s a very sad song. Each of the verses (except the last) is about the hope of the reformers for “socialism with a human face.” Dubček and his policies were hugely popular. And then it all came crashing down:

I seen a hand
I seen a vision
It was reaching through the clouds
To risk a dream
A shadow cross the sky
And it crushed into the ground
Just like a beast
The old man’s back again.

The last verse is told from the perspective of one of the invading soldiers, which I assume is meant to be Russian because the song specifically says he is “Ivan.” (There may be some other significance of this; if so, please let me know!)

But Walker still paints a sympathetic portrait of a young man who is confused and longing:

Devoured by his pain
Bewildered by the faces
Who pass him by.

Scott Walker’s gorgeous voice and the lush production hide just how painful a song this is. But I think that understanding the song in context makes it all the more beautiful.

Sadly, Walker died just over a year ago of cancer at the age of 76.

Scott 4 Album Cover via Wikipedia uder Fair use.

Let me start with a sad but beautiful story from classical music lore. Last night, I decided to tell it on Twitter.

Joseph Haydn was the father Mozart never had. You know: the father who wasn’t a total prick.

Haydn was 24 years older than the younger composer. Mozart was very protective of Haydn. When Haydn was preparing for a trip to England in 1791, Mozart begged him not to go

He was afraid the older man (58 years old!) would get ill and die. But Haydn went anyway. Mozart died while Haydn was in England.

Haydn lived almost 2 decades longer, dying in 1809 at the age of 77.

“Deutschlandlied”

With Haydn on my mind, I started listening to a playlist of his work. And I came upon “Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser.” But I knew it as a different song: “Deutschlandlied” with the beginning lyrics, “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.” I had no idea!

This shouldn’t come as a shock, however. People do this all the time. “The Star-Spangled Banner” uses the tune of John Stafford Smith’s “The Anacreontic Song.”

Indeed, “Deutschlandlied” has been the German national anthem from 1922, but they only use the third stanza, which is about unity, justice, and freedom. Supposedly, the song was never intended to be about Germany conquering other countries but rather the desire for German unification.

It is a great tune. It annoys me the US has a third-rate national anthem while countries like Germany and Russia and France have such great ones.

Austria

It’s a little weird to think that Joseph Haydn wrote the German national anthem when he was Austrian. But do you know who else was Austrian? Right. So it’s all good.

Here is Haydn’s “Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser”:

Note that I did not hear “Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser.” Haydn uses the melody as the basis of of the second movement of his string quartet Opus 76 No 3.

Image cropped from the John Hoppner portrait of Haydn in England in 1791. It is in the public domain.

It is often the case that something I see the government do causes me to think of “Kill the Poor” off Dead Kennedys’ debut Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables. It’s sad. At least to me, it shows how often policies are proposed and enacted with the clear intent to harm the poor.

This is certainly true of the recent efforts to cut back food stamp (SNAP) funding. And that’s very telling. The original idea of supporting food for the poor was because of government price floors on food. Since the government was making food more expensive, the least it could do was to help poor people struggling to afford it.

Today, we have conservatives who are all for continuing to enrich farmers (who are increasingly just large farming corporations) while hurting the poor. The justification conservatives use is the same as we recently heard from Ron Johnson about why he was against relief for people affected by Covid-19: it will make workers lazy.

Kill the Poor!

But that’s just their cover. They actually want to kill the poor and that brings us back to Dead Kennedys. You see, the truth is that “Kill the Poor” is not actually about this kind of thing. In the grand tradition of Jello Biafra, it’s much more concrete. It’s about the neutron bomb.

For those who don’t know, the neutron bomb is basically what our country termed a “dirty bomb” when it was speculated that terrorists might use it. It’s a bomb that has a low explosive yield and instead creates a bunch of neutron radiation, thus killing people but leaving structures mostly intact.

So I feel weird using it more generally to express how I feel. But I shouldn’t! It’s all the same psychopathy and xenophobia. Ron Johnson would be all for dropping a neutron bomb on San Francisco. But frankly, he probably doesn’t know they exist. He’s known to be something of a dimwit. And evil.

But you could say that about most American conservatives these days. Do you think the Senate would be seriously considering a relief bill if Hillary Clinton were president? There’s just no way.

Dead Kennedys by Zvargas16 licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

I listen to a wide variety of music, but there are particular artists who speak to me. The most obvious is American Music Club. But another is Counting Crows, who I’m sure a lot of people now hate simply because they were so popular. But I am never disappointed when I go back to them.

The song of their’s that most stood out to me was “Perfect Blue Buildings” off August and Everything After. It’s depressing even by the standards of Adam Duritz.

To me, it’s always been a junkie song. Just in the first verse we have “I stay at home with my disease” and “Help me stay awake, I’m falling.” There are other lines. Hell, almost every other line speaks about despair and death.

Obviously, it doesn’t have to be heroin — or any drug for that matter. In fact, it would be kind of a stereotype of heroin addiction, which normally gives junkies plenty of meaning, even if it is pretty thin.

But people do all kinds of things to keep themselves away from themselves. And the connection with the song is emotional. I think that the fear of a life out of control is universal.

This is an excellent live version of the song:

Image of August and Everything After via Amazon under Fair Use.