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The Savage God
I've had Maxwell's Silver Hammer popping into my head for weeks now.
It's a song the other Beatles hated- mainly because McCartney took it so seriously and made them work overtime to get it right.
They thought it was a throwaway bit of Granny music, but it ain't. For one thing it's about a mass murderer, for another it treats its subject with unbecoming levity. It's nihilistic but cheerful with it- in the best tradition of Mr Punch and the English music hall.
And this morning I stumbled across a piece of info that pulled everything together:
Macca had been taking an interest in Alfred Jarry, That's why "pataphysical"- a Jarry coinage- crops up in the first verse.
Jarry, you may or may not know, wrote a play called Ubu Roi- about an obscene little fat man who murders his way to the throne of Poland. It is absurd, scatalogical and an affront to all the decencies. Yeats was at the first night in 1896, cheering it on, but then went away and was sad because he knew it meant the end of the Celtic Twilight and all that greenery-yallery stuff that was his stock in trade and he'd have to toughen up if he wanted to survive in the new artistic environment. "After us," he wrote, "The savage gods."
Ever since he erupted onto the political scene I've thought of Donald Trump as Jarryesque. He's the living image of Pere Ubu. The savage god come into his own at last, or- Yeats again- the rough beast prophesied in "The Second Coming."
So here's the whole lineage: Mr Punch, Pere Ubu, Maxwell Edison, Donald Trump....
Maxwell's Silver Hammer is a song for our times.
It's a song the other Beatles hated- mainly because McCartney took it so seriously and made them work overtime to get it right.
They thought it was a throwaway bit of Granny music, but it ain't. For one thing it's about a mass murderer, for another it treats its subject with unbecoming levity. It's nihilistic but cheerful with it- in the best tradition of Mr Punch and the English music hall.
And this morning I stumbled across a piece of info that pulled everything together:
Macca had been taking an interest in Alfred Jarry, That's why "pataphysical"- a Jarry coinage- crops up in the first verse.
Jarry, you may or may not know, wrote a play called Ubu Roi- about an obscene little fat man who murders his way to the throne of Poland. It is absurd, scatalogical and an affront to all the decencies. Yeats was at the first night in 1896, cheering it on, but then went away and was sad because he knew it meant the end of the Celtic Twilight and all that greenery-yallery stuff that was his stock in trade and he'd have to toughen up if he wanted to survive in the new artistic environment. "After us," he wrote, "The savage gods."
Ever since he erupted onto the political scene I've thought of Donald Trump as Jarryesque. He's the living image of Pere Ubu. The savage god come into his own at last, or- Yeats again- the rough beast prophesied in "The Second Coming."
So here's the whole lineage: Mr Punch, Pere Ubu, Maxwell Edison, Donald Trump....
Maxwell's Silver Hammer is a song for our times.