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Music et al

Yip Harburg Finian’s Rainbow

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Yip Harburg Finian’s Rainbow

Tom Waits “Brother Can You Spare a Dime”

Yip Harburg

Yip Harburg Finian's Rainbow

We may not  recognize the name Yip Harburg, but play one of his over 600 tunes and we will eventually find ourselves repeating, “He wrote the lyrics to that, too?”

To name a few,  “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?,” “April in Paris,” and “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” as well as all of the songs in The Wizard of Oz, including “Over the Rainbow.” Yes that’s right. All of the songs in The Wizard of Oz.

Yip Harburg Finian’s Rainbow

Artist Activist

Not all artists are activists, but it is not surprising to find many who are. The artists senses the same world we do, but perceives it in ways that most people do not. We non-artists sometimes do and sometimes don’t recognize the Artist’s perception.

When we don’t we might think, why didn’t I ever see that? Or we might think, I have no idea what I’m seeing (or hearing).

Yip Harburg Finian’s Rainbow

Isidore Hochberg

Edgar Yipsel “Yip” Harburg was born Isidore Hochberg on April 8, 1896 in Manhattan. He was the son of two Russian immigrants. Harburg attended Townsend Harris High School where he met Ira Gershwin.

Harburg wrote lyrics both for movie and Broadway musicals. January 10 (1947) is the anniversary of  the musical Finian’s Rainbow‘s opening on Broadway. Among its songs was “When the Idle Poor Become the Idle Rich.”

Finian’s Rainbow was possibly the first Broadway musical with a racially integrated chorus line. [It was made into a film in 1968 starring Fred Astaire and Petula Clark, directed by Francis Ford Coppola.]The lyrics to “When the Idle Poor Become the Idle Rich” are classic satire as their sentiment still sadly applies to the views of many today.

When the idle poor become the idle rich,

You’ll never know just who is who or who is which,

Won’t it be rich when everyone’s poor relative becomes a Rockefellertive,

And palms no longer itch, what a switch,

When we all have ermine and plastic teeth,

How will we determine who’s who underneath?

And when all your neighbors are upper class,

You won’t know your Joneses from your Astors,

Let’s toast the day,

The day we drink that drinkie up,

But with the little pinkie up,

The day on which, the idle poor become the idle rich.

When a rich man doesn’t want to work,

He’s a bon vivant, yes, he’s a bon vivant,

But when a poor man doesn’t want to work,

He’s a loafer, he’s a lounger, he’s a lazy good for nothing, he’s a jerk.

When a rich man loses on a horse, isn’t he the sport?

Oh isn’t he the sport?

But when a poor man loses on a horse,

He’s a gambler, he’s a spender, he’s a lowlife,

He’s a reason for divorce. 

When a rich man chases after dames,

He’s a man about town, oh, he’s a man about town,

But when a poor man chases after dames,

He’s a bounder, he’s a rounder, he’s a rotter and a lotta dirty names.

When the idle poor become the idle rich,

You’ll never know just who is who or who is which,

No one will see the Irish or the Slav in you,

For when you’re on Park Avenue, Cornelius and Mike look alike.

When poor Tweedledum is rich Tweedledee,

This discrimination will no longer be,

When we’re in the dough and off of the nut,

You won’t know your banker from your butler.

Let’s make a switch, with just a few annuities,

We’ll hide those incongruities in clothes from Abercrombie Fitch.

When the idle poor become the idle rich,

When the idle poor become the idle rich

Yip Harburg Finian’s Rainbow

Blacklisted

Although he was not part of the original Hollywood Ten whose studios banned them from working in the entertainment industry, Yip’s membership in the Socialist Party earned him a place among the hundreds of others that the Government “exposed” and Hollywood titans punished by blacklisting them.

He died in a car accident in Los Angeles on March 5, 1981.

Yip Harburg Finian’s Rainbow

Legacy

On March 7, 2001 the results of a poll conducted by the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Endowment for the Humanities ranked Judy Garland’s rendition of “Over the Rainbow” as the Number One recording of the 20th century.

Yip Harburg Finian's Rainbow

In April 2005, the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp recognizing his accomplishments

Democracy Now piece on Harburg.

Yip Harburg Finian’s Rainbow
Music et al

Singer Songwriter John K Samson

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Singer Songwriter John K Samson

Singer Songwriter John K Samson

Who?

According to his site, John K. Samson is a singer-songwriter from Winnipeg, Treaty One Territory, where he also helps run a curling league and a chapter of Book Clubs for Inmates.”

And that is as good a description as you can give in one sentence. Unfortunately for me, I plan on doing a few more sentences.

Singer Songwriter John K Samson

Weakerthans

I first heard John with the band Weakerthans and I have the feeling that my next sentence will be as much a help to you as this one. The band appeared on Stuart McLean’s Vinyl Cafe.

I told you.

Though it is unfair to both great raconteurs, Stuart McLean was Canada’s Garrison Keillor in that both created and related wonderful stories about a fictional place. Humor is the centerpiece of both men’s skill. And both men have musicians play live.

Singer Songwriter John K Samson

Singer Songwriter John K Samson

Canadian

Stuart McClean was a proud Canadian and promoted Canadian performers. Unfortunately for we often-myopic Americans, many of these great Canadian performers are unknown south of their border.

The Weakerthans and John K Samson are prime examples. Like McClean and Keillor, Samson songs typically tell tales. Short stories, like “Winter Wheat” which begins…

Woke up in a parking lot
Air mattresses gone flat
The sun selecting targets for the shadows to attack
So make a visor with your hand
Squint at where you’re from
A lonely line of buildings you can block out with your thumb
Salute the way we tried
Singer Songwriter John K Samson

No stinkin’ categories

Categorizing the Samson’s melodies is useless. We don’t need no stinkin’ categories! Folk, punk, indie rock, post-punk, hardcore punk if you insist. Simply great music if you don’t.

Winter Wheat is also the name of his most recent release, his second solo album.  I love it. I love all his work whether solo or Weakerthans.

Let’s just follow one trilogy. The first from the Weakerthan album, Reconstruction Site. A cat begs its owner to get out of his doldrums:

Plea From A Cat Named Virtute
Why don’t you ever want to play?
I’m tired of this piece of string
You sleep as much as I do now
And you don’t eat much of anything
I don’t know who you’re talking to
I made a search through every room
But all I found was dust that moved
In shadows of the afternoon

Singer Songwriter John K Samson

Reunion

Then from another Weakerthan album, Reunion Tour comes…

Virtute The Cat Explains Her Departure
It had something to do with the rain
Leaching, loamy dirt
And the way the back lane came alive
Half moon whispered, “Go”
For a while I heard you missing steps in the street
And your anger pleading in an uncertain key
Singing the sound that you found for me

The end of the trilogy is sadly but not unexpectedly the end of Virtute. From Winter Wheat, 

Virtute At Rest

Now that the treatment and antidepressants
And seven months sober have built me a bed
In the back of your brain where the memories flicker
And I paw at the synapses, bright bits of string
You should know I am with you, know I forgive you
Know I am proud of the steps that you’ve made
Know it will never be easy or simple
Know I will dig in my claws when you stray
So let us rest here like we used to
In a line of late afternoon sun
Let it rest, all you can’t change
Let it rest and be done

Singer Songwriter John K Samson

Much more

Of course, there is more, much much more, to John K Samson than songs about a beloved cat. The the deep sense of love and belonging these three songs display are typical of Samson’s songs whether the love and belonging have succeeded or gone away.

Link to NPR review of Winter Wheat album.

Singer Songwriter John K Samson

Since then…

In 2018, Samson recorded a version of Fellows’ “Saturday Night at Utopia Parkway” for a split single with American musician Kevin Devine.

In 2019 he collaborated with Safia Nolin on a cover of Taking Back Sunday‘s “Cute Without the E” for her EP xX3m0 $0ng$ 2 $!nG @L0nG 2Xx.

In February 2020, Samson wrote and released “Millennium for All”, a song supporting the activist campaign against the new security restrictions at Winnipeg’s Millennium Library. He followed up in July with the single “Fantasy Baseball at the End of the World”

In February 2023, Fellows and Samson released Hold Music, an album of almost entirely instrumental music except one song with vocals by Samson. The album was credited to Vivat Virtute, the name of Fellows’ online music and crafts store.

Music et al, Peace Love Art and Activism

Mogwai Atomic Mark Cousins

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Mogwai Atomic Mark Cousins

Mogwai Atomic Mark Cousins

Mogwai

Mogwai Atomic Mark Cousins

I discovered the Scottish band Mogwai several years ago.  They formed in 1995 and their music falls under a category called “Post Rock.” Though that is the term, it does little to describe the typically instrumental sound that Mogwai and other so-called Post Rock bands play.

The music is soft. It is loud. The music is comfortable. It is excruciating. Dreamlike. Nightmarish. And because it is typically instrumental, it lends itself to one’s imagination and the cinematic.

Currently they are a 4-member band, though a fifth person occasionally becomes part of the band in the studio or in concert.

  • Stuart Braithwaite – guitar, bass, vocals
  • Dominic Aitchison – bass, guitar
  • Martin Bulloch – drums 
  • Barry Burns – guitar, bass, keyboards, synthesizer, flute, vocals 

Discography

The band has released several studio albums and live albums, as well as many EPs and singles. (Wikipedia discography)

Mark Cousins

It is a vast simplification to describe Mark Cousins as a filmmaker, just as it oversimplifies to say Mogwai plays instrumentals. Cousins does make films, but he also shows films in unique ways. For example, in 2009 he and actress/director Tilda Swinton created a project where they mounted a 33.5-tonne portable cinema on a large truck and hauled it manually through the Scottish Highlands. Their aim: a traveling film festival.  That project became part of 2011 documentary called Cinema is Everywhere.

Cousins also interviewed famous filmmakers such as David Lynch, Martin Scorsese and Roman Polanski in the TV series Scene by Scene.

Atomic

With music by Mogwai, Mark Cousins released Atomic: Living in Dread and Promise in 2015. It is an experimental documentary that looks at the Hiroshima nuclear bomb and its legacy. The movie’s site ( no longer up) stated that…”the bombing of Hiroshima showed the appalling destructive power of the atomic bomb.  Mark Cousins’ bold new documentary looks at death in the atomic age, but life too.  Using only archive film and a new musical score by the band Mogwai,  Atomic shows us an impressionistic kaleidoscope of our nuclear times: protest marches, Cold War sabre rattling, Chernobyl and Fukishima, but also the sublime beauty of the atomic world, and how X Rays and MRI scans have improved human lives.  The nuclear age has been a nightmare, but dreamlike too.”

Mogwai Atomic Mark Cousins

Atomic Trump

Mogwai Atomic Mark Cousins

At the time of the movie’s release,  President Trump continued tweeting that implied the use of atomic weapons was good strategy and that more nations (other than North Korea) needed to have atomic weapons. Perhaps it is time to get back under our school room desks, built bomb shelters, purchase freeze-dried foods, put on Mogwai, and cross our fingers.

NPR Review of Mogwai album.

Here is a link to an excellent Audience recording of Mogwai from 2016 in Berlin: Internet Archive

Mogwai Atomic Mark Cousins

Here is a YouTube link to a Q & A about the film.

Mogwai Atomic Mark Cousins