Forgotten (Songs) Friday
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Before Elvis Costello got all highbrow on me (okay, I do love his work with The Fairfield Four and shouldn't he be "Sir Elvis" by now?), he wrote the song Green Shirt. A song that I had forgotten I loved. The lyrics...wait... take these for instance:
"cause somewhere in the quisling clinic there's a shorthand typist taking seconds over minutes"
are right up there briliance-wise with Lewis Caroll's poem Jabberwocky. What's a "quisling clinic"?
Comments (4)
never get tired of this kind of elvis
This was my first Elvis song. WXRT used to play it a lot when Armed Forces came out. The enigmatic lyrics and skeletal arrangement hooked me immediately.
Costello says in some liner notes somewhere that "quisling clinic" was inspired by... a sign hanging on a building somewhere reading "Quisling Clinic." But "Quisling" is an age-old synonym for "traitor," too (see this), so I imagine someone's up to something very nasty in that clinic.
And with that song and that poem (Caroll is a genius, a genius!), you made my Sunday :*
Well, I am glad you liked it Anna and Rawk: I am to please (or my aim is true?)
And BUZZ! Thank you SO much for the quisling insight. this why I love MOG, so many cool people who know stuff! That's the kind of information that I seriously crave.