I managed to snag a six month (free) trial subscription to Spotify Premium – it was some tech giant’s way of thanking me for putting them on my permanent payroll. I didn’t set out to see what freebies I was getting but as I was trying to navigate a miserable website I just sort of stumbled across it, kind of like de Vaca and the Seven Cities of Cibola. I got six months of free Disney Plus through Verizon last year, so this back scratching by the big boys seems to be a thing.
Consequently, I have spent the last couple of days looking for and listening to new music, and by new music I mean old music I know but don’t already own. The more intimate I’m with the song the better. The older I get the more I treasure music with an emotional resonance from my youth. And so I turned to sound tracks and thus re-discovered the theme to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by John Barry and the theme to Duel at Diablo which unfortunately does not have a version from the movie, but a version by the Ersatz Orchestra from their album Cine Magic 66 which suffers from the brass not being as brassy nor the strings as stringy as the original. This life is a vale of suffering.
My hopes were raised by the existence of playlists on Spotify, but as per usual they were dashed because while I love my playlists, I don’t love your playlists. Musical tastes, like so many tastes, are very individual. Despite the right playlist name, the songs themselves just weren’t right. And most sadly, there is no KSHE classics playlist. This life is a vale of suffering.
Before playlists there were mix tapes – those were heady days when you could pick the exact songs in the exact order you wanted. Live Free or Die! I even had this little attache case full of them so I could bring them with me wherever I went. Sometimes there would be complaints, and I would point out the the mix tape was titled “Long, Boring, and/or Weird” so at least I was accurate (I am not making up the name). If I made new playlists with my newly (re-)discovered music they would be “There Will Be Brass” and “Music to Invade Poland By”.
Another one of the songs I rediscovered and have put into the weight lifting rotation (AKA Music to Invade Poland By) is “Duel of the Fates” from Star Wars Episode One or the fourth one, the one nobody wants to see again. It’s the music that plays during the climactic duel between Darth Maul and Qui-Gon and the only four minutes of the movie worth watching. The song itself is an homage to (such a polite way of saying theft of) “O Fortuna” of Carmina Burana fame which you’ve heard in a zillion movies and TV shows. I suppose John Williams thought to himself he could write something just as good and by golly he did. Even better. Except that for some reason he made it about corndogs. I’m not sure if it’s in praise of the corndog, or a lament you just can’t get a good corndog in the Star Wars universe – maybe Darth Maul thinks Qui-Gon has a corndog hidden somewhere in those flowing robes. Think of the suffering that would have been averted if Qui-Got had just given him a corndog.
I may not recognize any of the other words, but they sure say “Corndog!” a lot. It’s one of those words I suppose that you can’t translate. German would just concatenate corn battered meat tube on a stick into one word, so they aren’t singing German. Corndog is just so American that any other language simply borrows it lock, stock, and barrel. Even Sanskrit.
