Eight vaguely Hallowe’eny songs from one of my favourite bands. (I lived in the same town with them [Chapel Hill – so a flashback to my Carolina days this time, not my Idaho days] for five years* but never heard them perform live! Regrettable.)
[* Clarification: I lived in Chapel Hill for eight years, 1990–1998, but the Squirrel Nut Zippers didn’t come into existence until 1993.]
Given the radical changes in personnel over the years, there’s a ship-of-Theseus question as to whether these songs are all from the same band. But it is the same captain throughout, Jimbo Mathus.
Again, no real science-fiction tie; but I’ll make up for it in tomorrow’s grand finale.
319. Squirrel Nut Zippers, “La Grippe” (1995):
320. Squirrel Nut Zippers, “The Ghost of Stephen Foster” (1998):
321. Squirrel Nut Zippers, “Hell” (1996):
322. Squirrel Nut Zippers, “Blue Angel” (1996):
323. Squirrel Nut Zippers, “Bed Bugs” (2000):
324. Squirrel Nut Zippers, “Hey Shango” (2018):
325. Squirrel Nut Zippers, “Karnival Joe From Kokomo” (2018):
326. Squirrel Nut Zippers, “Beasts of Burgundy” (2018):
Okay, again not strictly science fiction, but it’s only two more days till Hallowe’en and our grand finale, and these offerings seem appropriate to the season:
The Addams Family and Munsters tv shows premiered the same year, and in fact the same week.
It’s clear which one was better, of course. I mean, just look at Carolyn Jones’s and John Astin’s expressions in the Addams Family opening. Worth the price of admission right there.
313. Jack Marshall, “Munsters Theme” (1964):
There were actually lyrics, but they were never used on the show:
314. Vic Mizzy, “Addams Family Theme” (1964):
Some more Addams Family songs from later incarnations of the franchise:
315. Betty Comden, Adolph Green, and Mark Shaiman (sung by Raul Julia and Christopher Lloyd), “Mamushka” (from the 1991 Addams Family movie):
And there’s another, unused version with more lyrics:
316. Christina Aguilera, “Haunted Heart” (from the 2019 Addams Family movie):
317. Buddy Baker, “Grim Grinning Ghosts” (1969):
Not Munsters or Addams Family related, but in the same spirit – the theme song from Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion ride:
318. Randy Newman (composer) and Keith David (performer), “Friends on the Other Side” (2009):
And this, from the movie The Princess and the Frog:
(If it doesn’t let you watch it here, just click through to watch it on YouTube.)
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818; rev. ed 1823) is often referred to as the first science-fiction novel. I don’t think it is that; there are, for example, the earlier stories of voyages to the moon by Francis Godwin in 1638 and Cyrano de Bergerac in 1657 (no less an authority than Arthur C. Clarke credited Cyrano’s book with anticipating the ramjet), to say nothing of Lucian’s similar tales fifteen centuries before those. But Frankenstein certainly represents a major pioneering work in science fiction, and the next three songs all have some connection to it.
310. Irving Berlin and Harry Richman, “Puttin’ on the Ritz” (1930):
“Puttin’ on the Ritz” began life as a racist and classist song making fun of working-class blacks trying to put on airs and dress fashionably; the original lyrics referred to “Lenox Avenue” (in Harlem), “every Thursday evening” (the traditional maids’ night off) instead of “Park Avenue,” and “fifteen dollars” (and “see them spend their last two bits”) instead of “lots of dollars,” and included such charming lines as:
spangled gowns
upon the bevy
of high browns
from down the levy
all misfits
puttin’ on the Ritz
Here’s Fred Astaire singing the same original-lyrics version, also in 1930; you can hear the lyrics a bit better in this one:
In 1946, Berlin rewrote the lyrics, likewise for Fred Astaire, to make it a song about upper-class (and presumptively white) people instead of lower-class black people, and this version of the lyrics became the standard one:
But then, in 1974, the performance of the song by Gene Wilder and Peter Boyle in Mel Brooks’ movie Young Frankenstein forever cemented its connection to the Frankenstein legend:
311. H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, “To Life” (from Shoggoth on the Roof, 2005)
H. P. Lovecraft’s short story “Herbert West – Reanimator” is a modern updating of the Frankenstein story. It’s far from being his best story, and Lovecraft was never happy with it; but its mad-scientist protagonist is nonetheless one of the many Lovecraft characters to appear in the Lovecraft-inspired parody musical Shoggoth on the Roof, in which various songs from Fiddler on the Roof are rewritten with humourous lyrics reflecting the Lovecraft mythos. (Alas, the musical’s actual stage performance is illegal, because IP.) Here, for example, “To life, to life, l’chaim!” becomes “To life, to life, I’ll bring them!” – which is arguably the cleverest change in the lot.
Here’s the original song (from the 1971 movie):
And here’s the Re-Animated version:
312. Bobby Pickett, “Monster Mash” (1962):
Finally, this next song is especially appropriate to Hallowe’en, which is nearly upon us.
While “Monster Mash,” sung in imitation of Boris Karloff’s voice (except for Dracula’s line about the Transylvania Twist, where Pickett imitates Bela Lugosi instead), invokes various popular movie monsters, the centerpiece of the song is the Frankenstein legend. Indeed, Lugosi-Dracula’s “Transylvania Twist” line is a complaint about his own dance being displaced in popularity by the Frankenstein-inspired “Monster Mash” dance. (Pickett did indeed release a “Transylvania Twist” number, but it’s poor competition for the Mash.) Here, by contrast with the movie version, the Karloff voice seems to be the doctor’s rather than the monster’s (“I was working in the lab late one night”), although at some point the perspective may shift to that of the monster (if, as I suspect, “get a jolt from my electrodes” refers to the electrodes embedded in the monster’s neck in the Karloff movies – and Pickett’s Karloffian facial expressions in the video also suggest the monster more than the scientist).
The song was initially banned by the BBC for being “too morbid.”
When I was eight years old (so, in 1972), and my mother and I were living in San Diego, my grandmother invited us over to her apartment to watch a miniseries on Leonardo da Vinci – part documentary, part docudrama – that was playing on CBS (since we didn’t have a tv at home). My grandmother spun it as a useful educational opportunity for me; more likely the invitation was part of some sort of power game against my mother, but in any case we went, and despite the tiny black and white screen I was hooked – that was when I fell in love with Renaissance Italy. (So thank you, Gram’ma, whatever your motives.)
I’m happy to see that this series is now available online. I gather that the series exists in both abridged and unabridged versions, and I’m not sure which this is, but you can’t beat the price:
Okay, most of these next songs are fantasy rather than science fiction, and I have no real excuse for including them, except that it’s almost Hallowe’en and two of the songs involve ghosts; plus these songs take me back to my western days of yore; plus this is a goddamn anarchist blog and I’ll do whatever seemeth right in my own eyes, dagnabit:
305. Stan Jones, “(Ghost) Riders in the Sky” (1948):
Here’s the original version:
But today this song is usually best known either through Johnny Cash’s version (1979):
– or through Cash’s duet with Willie Nelson (1997):
Here’s a somewhat more unusual cover:
I’m not sure what version I originally heard (it’s been covered many times), but I’m pretty sure I knew it when I was still living out west, in which case it’d be a pre-Cash version (since we relocated to New England in 1977).
306. C. W. McCall, “Convoy” (1975):
When I was living in southeast Idaho in the mid-70s, trucker songs were big on the radio; and the king of them all, of course, was the immortal C. W. McCall. This trucker anthem, with its shocking disrespect for the gangsters in blue our heroic first responders, counts as science fiction by my generous definition, since it’s about a fictional nationwide trucker rebellion (for more specific details as to what it’s about, and some translations of the CB slang, see the song’s Wikipedia page). (McCall has featured previously in this SongFest, though not with a trucker song.)
307. C. W. McCall, “’Round the World With the Rubber Duck” (1976):
This is the (deservedly) lesser-known sequel to “Convoy,” a weak (and somewhat racist) follow-up that I don’t recall even hearing at the time; it’s surely one of McCall’s less-inspired songs. The previous song’s Friends of Jesus turn out to come in handy for crossing the Atlantic, though:
308. C. W. McCall, “Silver Iodide Blues” (1976):
To redeem McCall’s reputation, here’s another of his good songs. Is it science fiction? Not really. It’s about science, though:
309. Red Sovine, “Phantom 309” (1967):
Yes, I managed to work it out so that “Phantom 309” would also be song #309. The stars have aligned!
While McCall was the king of the trucker songs in my Idaho days, the following song by Red Sovine was in frequent rotation on the radio as well:
Sovine and McCall, perhaps along with someone’s version of “Ghost Riders in the Sky” as well, jointly inspired me to write my own supernatural trucker song (I was around 12), of which I remember only the chorus (though I probably still have the rest of it in a box somewhere). There’s a melody too, but I’ll spare you, for I am compassionate and merciful, like this driver:
God drives an eighteen-wheeler
across this land of ours
his wheels shake the whole land round about
and the noise shakes the stars
the sound of his engine fills the hills
and the smoke from his smokestack curls
he’s the guy who said “Let there be light!”
and his headlights light the world
No, she didn’t invent pizza. But she was notable in other ways.
Christine de Pizan (born Cristina da Pizzano; 1364-c. 1430 [thus either late mediæval or early Renaissance, depending on your definition]) – poet, historian, essayist, political theorist, political activist, and pioneering feminist – was Venetian by birth; but her father Tommaso, a philosopher and astrologer, had been serving as a temporary advisor at the court of King Charles V of France (a position which he had chosen, in the event perhaps unwisely, over a similar post in Hungary), and when the time came for Tommaso to return to his family in Venice, the king refused to let him leave, and instead insisted that Tommaso bring his family to Paris. Thus Christine grew up in Paris rather than Venice.
Christine de Pizan and the Mutant Head Ladies
As a teenager she was married to Étienne du Castel, a secretary in Charles’s court. Both father and husband encouraged her studies in history, philosophy, politics, literature, and religion – but not, as she would later have cause to regret, in business affairs. In an autobiographical poem, she explains:
My father, whom I’ve aforementioned,
Had one wish in his great ascension:
To have a male child – unfulfilled.
To him he could have safely willed
His mighty fortune and his land.
Between my parents there did stand
A duplicitous agreement,
Or so it seems: my father meant
Something different from my mother,
For instead of male, the other
Sex was I born, though otherwise
I had my father’s looks: his eyes,
His hair, his build. She had tricked him.
But despite the original dictum,
I was a loved and cherished child;
My father’s doubts I had beguiled. …
And thus I grew up without fear
Of the injustice all too near:
Among infant playmates equality
Reigns, whereas adult polity,
Riddled with prejudice, reacts
In the interest of male contracts.
How little I knew, a woman destined
To have, by this menace, lessened
Her fortune, as sole legatee,
Stolen by legal repartee.
Charles V had promised ongoing economic support for Tommaso and his family, but died without having ever officially decreed it, thus leaving the de Pizans suddenly without patronage. (While de Pizan always showers Charles V with praise, both in her autobiography and in her book Deeds and Good Character of King Charles V the Wise, if one reads between the lines one can see that this king was in fact the author of many of her misfortunes – first by compelling her father to bring his family to Paris, and then by not following through with his promises of economic security.)
Then Christine’s father and husband also died, in quick succession, leaving her to be the sole support of both her children and her mother.
Christine’s marriage had been a happy one, and Castel’s death was devastating to her emotionally. Here’s one of the many songs of mourning she wrote in response to his death:
But her widowhood was also a financial and legal disaster. As de Pizan explains in her autobiography:
For I was not with my husband when he was carried off by a sudden plague in the city of Beauvais …. As he was accompanied only by his servants and an unfamiliar retinue, I was not able to get full and precise information on the state of his affairs. For it is customary for married men not to discuss financial matters in detail with their wives, a practice that often leads to great problems, as I have learned from experience, and does not make any sense at all when a woman is not stupid but prudent and wise in her dealings.
Thus it behooved me to set to work, I who had been indulged and pampered as a child and had no experience in such matters, and take the helm of the captainless ship in mid-storm, by which I mean the bereft household far from its homeland. Troubles surged upon me from all sides, and as is the common lot of widows, I became entangled in legal disputes of every sort. …
What a trial it is for a woman like me, who is rather retiring by nature and little concerned with material possessions or money, to be forced by my financial responsibilities to seek out various officials, only to be tormented day after day by their smooth words!
Christine de Pizan’s writings comment frequently on the mutability of fortune. I’d like to buy a vowel.
Two years earlier she had recounted her life story in a more allegorical form, with the remarkable figure of her transformation into a man:
So moving were my desperate cries
That even before her cold eyes
My plight caused Fortune to amend
Her fiendish ways and be my friend. …
But, fatigued was I from crying;
Near-paralyzed, there lying
I fell asleep toward suppertime
Then, descending from her clime ….
She had arrived to help me, there,
And touched my body everywhere …
And went away. There I remained
Aloft; ocean waves waxed and waned;
Finally, with one mighty crash,
Our ship against the rocks was smashed,
Awakening me. I felt all strange:
My body undergoing change
All over I felt transmutated:
No longer weak and subjugated.
Each limb of mine did feel much stronger,
I, discomfited no longer ….
All over I felt myself afresh,
As I touched muscle – a man’s flesh!
And my voice took on assurance
As my body gained endurance ….
Let me summarize, this moment,
Just who I am, what all this meant.
How I, a woman, became a man
By a flick of Fortune’s hand;
How she changed my body’s form
To the perfect masculine norm.
I’m a man, no truth I’m hiding,
You can tell by how I’m striding ….
So I raised my eyes all around,
At the mangled ship all dashed aground:
Sail and mast I saw in tatters;
To angry storms, nothing matters ….
When I’d seen this devastation,
I prepared for reparation.
Hammer in hand, with mortar and nails,
I rejoined the planks; then where snails
Dwell, under rocks, I gathered moss
To cover leaks, I spread it across,
And made the hull watertight, then
I drained the bilge: she floats again!
In no time at all, I could sail,
For I learned to pilot, to prevail
Over oceans at my command,
I and my crew knew to withstand
Danger and fend off death. Now see,
Like a real man; I have to be.
Fortune kindly taught me the way
To do manly deeds, to this day.
As you can tell, men are my peers
As they have been for thirteen years.
Though ’twould please me more than a third,
To return as woman and be heard.
Conversant with French, Italian, and Latin, de Pizan was able, thanks to various noble patrons, to support herself through her writing; her voluminous output included love-poetry, didactic poetry, royal biographies, literary criticism, political theory, educational theory, a textbook on the art of war (which was actually used), a project for international law, and a spirited encomium of Joan of Arc.
Rosalind Brown-Grant, the translator of City of Ladies, writes:
One important feature of Christine’s style in the City of Ladies deserves a special mention …. When she wants to make a particular point about men as opposed to humankind in general, Christine de Pizan is careful to distinguish between, on the one hand, the specific term ‘les hommes’, meaning simply the male sex, and, on the other hand, generic terms such as ‘les gens’, which refer to both sexes, or sex-neutral terms such as ‘la personne’, which can indicate either sex. Moreover, Christine is equally concerned not to subsume the female pronoun ‘elles’ under the male pronoun ‘ils’ in those cases where she wants to highlight the moral equality of men and women …. In this respect … she is ahead of her time in anticipating many of the arguments that modern feminist linguistics has raised about sexist language.
Unlike such female forerunners as the literary patrons Eleanor of Aquitaine and Marie de Champagne, or the poets Beatriz de Dia and Marie de France, de Pizan was hostile to the tradition of courtly love – although she herself composed works in the genre. (I’ve written a bit about her views on this topic previously, here.) In her “Letter of the God of Love,” she describes courtly love as essentially a trap to hoodwink women:
But now in France, the place where in the past
Women were honored so, those men who’re false
Dishonor them, more than in other lands ….
The loyal lovers’ pose they strike is false.
Hiding behind their myriad deceits,
They go declaring that a woman’s love
Inflames them sorely, keeps their hearts locked up;
The first laments, the second’s heart is wrenched,
The next pretends to fill with tears, and sighs;
Another claims to sicken horribly:
Because of love’s travail he’s grown quite pale,
Now perishing, now very early dead.
Swearing their fervent oaths, hey lie and vow
To be discreet and true, and then they crow. …
Now Ovid, in a book he wrote, sets down
Profuse affronts; I say that he did wrong ….
In which he teaches them and openly
Elucidates the way to trick the girls
By means of subterfuge, and have their love. …
And Jean de Meun’s The Romance of the Rose,
Oh, what a long affair! How difficult! …
So many efforts made and ruses found
To trick a virgin – that, and nothing more!
Christine de Pizan recites a spell from the Necronomicon that is guaranteed to turn four men into one.
De Pizan had a particular animus against Jean de Meun, whose work contained passages so offensive that she “jumped over them like a cat on hot bricks.” She was especially incensed at the view, propounded by de Meun and other mediæval writers, that women want to be raped and put up only a fake resistance. In her City of Ladies, she replies by recounting such stories as that of the Roman noblewoman Lucretia, whose response to being raped was to commit suicide; or, alternatively, that of the Queen of the Galatians, who, after being kidnapped and raped, “bided her time and hid her feelings” until a propitious moment, whereupon, as de Pizan recounts with considerable satisfaction, “the lady picked up a knife, slit [her rapist’s] throat and killed him,” and then “cut off his head, and without a hint of remorse, took it to show her husband.”
I’ve discussed previously how, in her novel The Duke of True Lovers, what de Pizan says about courtly-love relationships and what she shows about them through the novel’s events are somewhat at odds. But that is not the only notable tension in de Pizan’s work:
In her City of Ladies, she holds up rulers, scholars, warriors, Amazons, and other independent and assertive women as role models for contemporary women (and elsewhere she cites Joan of Arc as an ideal); and yet in the sequel, Treasure of the City of Ladies, the actual advice she offers to women is much more conventional. Young women in particular are advised to be
in their countenances, conduct and speech moderate and chaste, and … quiet … with their eyes lowered. … In the street and in public they should be mild and sedate, and at home not idle but always busy with some housework. … Their speech should be amiable and courteous to all people; they should have a humble manner and not be too talkative.
The spell worked! And changed the wallpaper too!
One possible (I think, likely) explanation for the tension is that de Pizan was torn between a) an expansive and inspiring vision of what women are capable of in the abstract, and b) a straitened recognition of the strict limits to what women can expect to get away with in ordinary life, given prevailing social sanctions for “improper” female behaviour. (Both (a) and (b) are, after all, pervasive themes throughout her work.)
Yet she also sometimes seems to express approval of those limits. Thus, while on the one hand she frequently complains about the harm and injustice that are done to women by keeping them ignorant of and excluded from knowledge of financial and legal matters, on the other hand she nevertheless upholds, as God-given, the very gendered division of labour that leads to the situation she complains about:
[J]ust as a wise and prudent lord organizes his household into different domains and operates a strict division of labour amongst his workforce, so God created man and woman to serve Him in different ways …. God gave men strong, powerful bodies to stride about and to speak boldly, which explains why it is men who learn the law and maintain the rule of justice. … Even though God has often endowed many women with great intelligence, it would not be right for them to abandon their customary modesty and to go about bringing cases before a court …
Such passages have sometimes led to charges that de Pizan does not count as an authentic pioneer of feminism. I think it is fairer to say that her thought contains both feminist and antifeminist strands, but that the feminist strands are distinctive and pervasive enough, especially by comparison with most of her contemporaries, that she deserves a place in the feminist canon.
