Seven Is a Jolly Good Time

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"Canterbury" style prog rock is notable for its frequently self-referential joke content: songs about singing, notes about notes following notes. These lyrics, for example:

"This is the second verse, the second verse, maybe the last one, or maybe the chorus... or perhaps it's a bridge... or just a-nother... key change [song changes key]" (Robert Wyatt)

Or this intro from the first Hatfield and the North LP:

Here's a song to begin the beginning
a few notes which are arbitrary
but we try our best to make it sound nice
and hope that the music turns you on to our latest L.P.
so do have a laugh certainly.

But you gotta give special credit for nerdy prog recursiveness to a song about time signatures. (NB: The members of Egg were in their teens when they wrote this.)

Seven Is a Jolly Good Time, Egg, UK, 1969

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Lyrics:

1
I used to play in four time when I was very small
Recently I've realised the folly of it all
So grim a thought disturbed me, upset my decent mind
I started writing songs in all the rhythms I could find
Like five...

Seven is a jolly good time, seven is a jolly good time
It's such a very good sign to play in seven time
Seven is a jolly good time, seven is a jolly good time
It's such a very good sign to play in seven time

I found it hard to follow, my foot became confused
My facial muscles echoed the rhythms that I used
And now I found my métier playing in a group
I gather all the notes up and jump them through a hoop
As in eleven...

Seven is a jolly good time, seven is a jolly good time
It's such a very good sign to play in seven time
Seven is a jolly good time, seven is a jolly good time
It's such a very good sign to play in seven time

It really doesn't matter
It really doesn't matter
It really doesn't matter
It really doesn't matter
(repeat)
Seven is a jolly good time, seven is a jolly good time
It's such a very good sign to play in seven time
Seven is a jolly good time, seven is a jolly good time
It's such a very good sign to play in jolly old seven time

 

science or nothing

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docs

via email, fanfare notes: "the seemingly impossible 'reasonable' doctor who would think to give you a banana before a potassium pill, but *also* not practice homeopathy - it's like they don't exist, for whatever reason..."

horseshoe crabs - tags

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Horseshoe_Crabs_650w

Photo from The Verge, showing horseshoe crabs being milked for their blood, used for testing, by "American biomedical companies." Hundreds of thousands of crabs -- beautiful "living fossils" -- are captured and bled in this fashion, endangering the species.

Possible tags:

Nazi science
Reptilians
Death cult
Demonic
Exploitation
Gaia
Capitalist leeches
Life out of balance
Unethical
Frankenscience
End times
Big pharma excess
Angry mob
White collar crime
Executive punishment
Horror movie
Factory farm
Biodiversity loss
Bad karma
"Saving human lives" (for profit)

the technobabble happens here (part 2)

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We've made fun of the hyper-punctuated technospeak of this tweet by Lozana_Rossenova:

Lozana_Rossenova_crop

In terms of verbal communication, someone who grew up learning English in the classical sense might have no idea what any of the above meant. Also, what is a "PhD w/ Rhizome?" Is Rhizome.org now "accredited" is that just some fun thing? Must have missed this somewhere.

The tweet also comes up mysteriously short in the visual department. Those familiar with MTAA's decades-old "The Art Happens Here" cartoon know that the image was a blinking animated GIF (the lightning bolt trembled). You can't upload those to Twitter -- Twitter converts them to video -- but Rossenova didn't take that step; it was simply rendered as a flat .png. So much for net-art-as-inspiration (&more!). Worse, what is that swirly stuff surrounding MTAA's rectangle? Apparently it was one of a series of ambient backgrounds uploaded to Rhizome's server by an ad agency that did Rhizome's last design. It's basically decorative fluff and has no business being attached to "art" -- imagine a show of 1960s conceptualism at the Metropolitan Museum with Rainbow Brite patterns instead of white walls. So much for "designing archival interactions" and "interface transparency" (again, whatever those might be).