(no subject)
Dec. 27th, 2005 02:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
progListening to my iPod today, I started wondering if anyone had ever written a Radioheadesque song about Lynn Truss-style punctuation rage and titled it "Comma Police".
Then I started thinking that, instead of doing the obvious thing and changing the original song's lyrics into those dealing with comma bad punctuation, it would be funnier if the song's speaker was actually the bad punctuation user, futilely trying to bring down the Comma Police on the infractions he perceives. And then it of course occurred to me that you could transform the whole song as it currently exists simply by understanding that the speaker actually is saying
BTW, serious question: when talking about a lyrical musical piece that explicitly reflects someone's thoughts or feelings, how do you refer to that person? I know from high school that in poetry this entity is conventionally called "the speaker" (or at least 'twas so with my poet-geek English teacher), and I use that when talking about songs as well. It doesn't seem quite right, though, since (unlike with written poetry) a song features the literal presence of an actual voice, and that voice is singing, not speaking. But "the singer" seems quite incorrect, since that's definitely a pointer to the person who is standing here (or who has been recorded) singing, and not the "character" he or she is portraying, dig?
Then I started thinking that, instead of doing the obvious thing and changing the original song's lyrics into those dealing with comma bad punctuation, it would be funnier if the song's speaker was actually the bad punctuation user, futilely trying to bring down the Comma Police on the infractions he perceives. And then it of course occurred to me that you could transform the whole song as it currently exists simply by understanding that the speaker actually is saying
s/karma/comma/i (something aided by the singer's accent) and that his notion of the song's lyrics as written contain flagrant comma misuse:This is what, you get This is what, you get This is what, you get when you, mess with us
BTW, serious question: when talking about a lyrical musical piece that explicitly reflects someone's thoughts or feelings, how do you refer to that person? I know from high school that in poetry this entity is conventionally called "the speaker" (or at least 'twas so with my poet-geek English teacher), and I use that when talking about songs as well. It doesn't seem quite right, though, since (unlike with written poetry) a song features the literal presence of an actual voice, and that voice is singing, not speaking. But "the singer" seems quite incorrect, since that's definitely a pointer to the person who is standing here (or who has been recorded) singing, and not the "character" he or she is portraying, dig?