Today's song is...
You Probably Get That A Lot
I have listened to this song, probably 500 times and I still don't understand what the green army men have to do with the cephalophore. It's the one line in the song that still makes me go "huh?" Don't get me wrong, I totally love it. It just confuses me.
It seems like every TMBG album has at least one vocabulary word that I have to look up the first time I listen to the song. Join Us had a few but understanding what a cephalophore was was critical to my understanding of the song. I still remember that "ah ha" moment I had when Gary mimed swinging one's head in one's head by the hair, that totally blew my mind on the double meaning in the "swing your head" line. And how totally bemused I was to realize that "bodiless baboonsman" really was the line I had been hearing and not just a mis-hearing I had constructed in my head.
I think when we talk about the fandom term "Linnellian" and everything that means this is an absolutely perfect example of the term. There are so very many wonderful songs on Join Us, but I don't think any of them are quite as clever as this one.
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My take: The woman is a cephalophore in the figurative sense, drawing on the idiom "to have a good head on one's shoulders".
ReplyDeleteSo yes, she's an airheaded/scatterbrained klutz, she's a bit not there (melting down toy soldiers to make green tea, how scatterbrained can you get?), but she's happy and carefree - which the jaded overanalyzing narrator seems to envy.
I didn't think they had anything to do with the cephalophore per se -- it's just a silly way to make "green tea." I like Eka's interpretation, though.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite thing about this song is the way it borrows from Georgy Girl.