Category: Songs, Sung and Unsung

by Gord Sellar

glittering of remote eyes
the bars are one and two and three
a walnut shell of infinite size
the cell becomes a world for me

digitally captured
transmitted through the atmosphere
microradiation scars
the webcast viewers’ gleeful cheer

this is your life before the lens
this is the way the old world ends
this is the way we blur the border
this is the way we keep things in order

clipper chips buzz off away
while we’re imprisoned in prime time
people reason reason away
and lo and behold, our ratings climb

this is your life before the lens
this is the way the old world ends
this is the way we blur the border
this is the way we keep things in order

it comes like a virus,
a secret kingdom consolidating,
microviewers and spook machines
constantly preparing, evading, invading

spreads like virus, spreads like language
infiltrating, poisonou sight
stumble into the coming age
haloed in flickering light

Panopticon, you are everything
Panopticon, you endemic trick
Panopticon, you are everywhere
Panopticon, and we don’t care
this is your life before the lens
this is the way the old world ends
this is the way we blur the border
this is the way we keep things in order

Another song written for my old band but which never ended up going beyond the melody-and-lyrics point, for reasons I can’t recall. By this point, it may well have been despairing of anything actually getting past that point. (I began to think of songwriting for that particular group a waste of time for me after a certain point, for reasons I won’t get into here.)

The “Live From Madison Street Jail” reference is to the use of webcams in Madison Street Jail in downtown Phoenix, Arizona. A more recent article about the court case that erupted over it is here, with a pretty positive outcome… sort of.

by Gord Sellar

The wonderful thing about ajumas is that they know the world has its limits. They’ll wrestle you to the ground for a seat on the subway, and they’ll whup your ass if you try to hold your rightful place in line against their combined force. The terrible thing about ajumas is that the world has made them to be this way. The first will be last, and the last will be first, and I think the cryptic message is that the last will pound the shit out of the first with an iron bowl on the way past, if the first doesn’t watch his bloody step. And that’s kind of scary and magnificent at the same time, even though it’s just a fantasy… of mine, or of theirs, I don’t know.

So in my dream, they’re amassed into a crowd, the biggest crowd I’ve ever seen, and they’re walking along the Taehakno of some small city I don’t know the name of. Ajuma kal guk su shikdang, Shinpo uri mandu, McDonald’s, slide past me as I am borne up by the flow of them. They’re a river, noisy chattering counterpoint of these splendid contralto and tenor voices, laughing and arguing about what sounds like either gossip or strategy. Maybe they’re the same thing.

And they’re really quite happy, that’s the thing that shocks me. Or maybe not: the familiar waft of soju on the night air. They’re brutally resplendent, if I can crib a line off Milton or someone. I mean to say, they glow in the dark from this kind of insane happiness. It comes off them like liquid, drips into the gutters, and even the trash seems brighter. Their voices ring along the dark street with its somnophobic neon lighting, and not a single nubile agashi in sight, they chatter. I see in their animal pleasure in being a crowd, my own animal pleasure in seeing the crowd. All these women have voices inside their heads, like I do. They all laugh from the gut.

They don’t know I am among them. They can’t see me, most of them, and the few who can see me talk to me in their own language. I don’t understand a word, but the gist is something good. Or something to do with icicles. There are grandchildren in millions of beds all around us, and they are in these flickering temporary streets, walking without placards, not silent, not dancing against Pinochet, not rising up against the Taliban, just exchanging recipes and laughing at their husbands’ foibles. And that’s it; then I am awake.

— Iksan, South Korea, 2003

This is not so much a song as a piece of “spoken word” that I’d written to accompany an instrumental track, which never got used. I think it’s funny, though, and reminds me of life in Iksan. Oh, and the text really was inspired by a dream I had sometime after World Cup Soccer tournament happened was cohosted by Korea and Japan in 2002, and I saw a sleepy little town go (happily) insane for a month.

by Gord Sellar

He thinks of stories, of reason and rhyme:
they circle around in his brain.
He sees the wretched faces of people
returning again and again.

CHORUS:
What’s happened to his philosophy?
The best of all possible worlds, this was.
What’s happened to all his reasoned conviction
In the best of all possible worlds?

Some can’t abide the peace of it,
this cultivated land.
The things between what’s thought and seen
can turn your will to sand.

The others have tired of playing the game of
my sorrow’s bigger than yours;
Rascals turned gentlemen, now smile taking tea
with reformed bordello-whores.

CHORUS:
What’s happened to his philosophy… (etc.)

Two capsules a day, morning and night
to take the edge off, he’s told.
There is more light, more brightness, yes,
but also, he fears, less world.

But the rosy haze is back, he smiles,
syphilitic once more and falling apart,
and Pangloss praises in syllogism
his apothecary’s art.
Yes, Pangloss praises in syllogism
his apothecary’s art.

— Jeonju, 2004.

Another song written for Dabang Band that never got recorded, but which I like the lyrics for.

by Gord Sellar and Dabang Band

One day, got the notion, in the ocean,
One day, thought that he would learn to swim;
That day, must admit he was a fool,
That day went straight to the swimming pool…

Signed up, took a class down at the YMCA,
With families, children and their mothers;
Fathers, reclining in the hot tubs and the saunas,
And there he was among them, a pink unicorn

Day one, shocked to see him, everybody;
Day two, they all see him screw it up;
Day three, gangster in class, tattooed ass;
Day four, they go out and drink it up;
On day five, he looks up and he sees the lifeguard dive,
Her movements, smooth like spilling milk:
In lane five, she makes her way from one end to the other —
He wants to talk to her, but just then does not dare.

sax solo

In lane five, he looks again to see the lifeguard dive,
Her movements, smooth like rolling clouds:
In lane five, she makes her way from one end to the other —
He wants to talk to her, but just then does not dare…
He wants to talk to her, but just then does not dare.

The deep end… the deep end… the deep end… the deep end… the deep end.

Unlike most of my “songs”, “The Deep End” was conceived from start to finish as a song, not originally as a poem. I think this shows in the structure of the lyrics, in a positive way. In any case, the song turned out quite differently than I expected: I had in mind the tempo (and the basic drum beat) of the Belle & Sebastian song “Expectations,” but we ended up with something a lot slower and with a more chunky beat. I still think it would make a good uptempo song, though.

I originally came up with the melody whilst showering after the swimming class I took at the YMCA in Iksan, South Korea, in 2003; I decided therefore to write the lyrics about the experience of the class (and more generally my experience as a foreigner living in Korea), as well as making it a tribute to the most unusual of the swim instructors/lifeguards at the pool. (While I didn’t fall in love with her, I thought she was cool.) There was a guy in our class who was tattooed, and many suspected he’d been a gangster at some point; I suspect it too, but it’s not like he went all Tony Soprano in front of us. (Unless you count shouting at a waitress.)

“The Deep End” is available on the Dabang Band album Product (2004); you can find out more about the album here. Or, heck, click here to stream the song.

by Gord Sellar & Dabang Band

Verse:
people stopped me in the street
to suggest to me this jeonbuk treat
they say it to everyone who’s new —
you gotta visit the jeonju jew
it took a while to penetrate
the accent but i got it straight
a few hours later then i knew
they meant not jew but jeonju zoo

Chorus:
Ringlets! Black hat!
Hasidic shouts of oy!
Torah in hand in this unpromised land!

verse 2:
an elephant without a trunk
a balding obese chimpanzee
two tigers sulking in a funk
nothing much to see
a wolf lacking a lower jaw
a quadriplegic polar bear
one featherless schitzoid macaw
you’re better off not going there

chorus

sax solo

verse 3:
cages, cages, row on row,
persisting in my overflow
no matter what you make me do,
don’t take me to the jeonju zoo
i’d rather go to gyeongijeong
when I’ve got nowt to do,
and wander through the crowd down there,
hunting the jeonju jew

– Dabang Band, Product (2004)

chorus

This is the version of my poem (viewable here) which ended up on the Dabang Band album Product. To understand the song, it is necessary to know that in Korean pronunciation of English, there is no sound like the letter Z. Koreans therefore pronounce it as a “J” sound. On my arrival in Jeonju, I was constantly being asked whether I had visited the Jeonju Jew; the more I heard about the real Jeonju Zoo (the trunkless elephant was real), the more I preferred to imagine some Orthodox Jewish man in Jeonju whom I was supposed to visit instead.

The song was supposed to be titled “The Jeonju Jew” but in a fit of political correctness (not by me) it was changed to “The Jeonju Zoo.” (I have ignored this where I’ve posted the music online, but it all comes down to me.) It is not meant as a racist slur, as I imagine anyone who hears the song and understands the context would agree.

This song was recorded and often performed by the band I was in at the time, Dabang Band. You can hear the song here, or see the original poem version here.

by Gord Sellar

Wake up before dawn, and with any luck
Out on the highway, we’re the only truck,
Dust in tail-lights,
We drive on through the night,
Never see a light…
But you know, it’s alright…

And as the sun comes up, we finally stop,
To get some coffee in a truck stop,
The people sound strange here,
Smell of savoured beer,
Smile and call you “dear.”

Look up high, at the geese up in the sky,
They are winging their way homeward.
Here we are, and we’ve come so very far,
I’m sure that we’ll make Spiritwood by dawn.

They speak with words that make no sense to you,
And we begin to talk just like we used to do,
Don’t want to go,
I tell you ’bout the snow
But I guess you’ll never know…

Look up high, at the geese up in the sky,
They are winging their way homeward.
Here we are, and we’ve come so very far,
I’m sure that we’ll make Spiritwood by dawn.

This place I’m from that you will never see,
This place I want to take you, there with me
We’d drive until the end
of night, and maybe then,
we’d go back home again.

Look up high, at the geese up in the sky,
They are winging their way homeward.
Here we are, and we’ve come so very far,
I’m sure that we’ll make Spiritwood by dawn.

Despite my dislike of a lot of country music, this is a sort of folksy-country-ish song I wrote for Dabang Band. Probably it was the influence of Yo La Tengo’s Ride the Tiger that got this kind of sound in my head — I vaguely remember album sounding a little country-tinged to me, something about the guitar-picking and the very simple drumming on a lot of songs, but also the singing; the album implanted a very earnest melody and a tumbling brush-snare drumbeat in my mind, and I dug out a poem that fit the meter of the tune, and which I just knew would work.

Alas, nobody heard it but me: the song never ended up in our repertory. I had a lot of trouble communicating the bouncy country feel of the tune, and in the run-through it sounded more like some kind of love-song ballad thing, which was exactly NOT what it was supposed to sound like… but it was too late, by that point, and the song ended up in the dustbin. The tune is still clear in my head, though.

by Gord Sellar

Chorus:
I’m a-walkin’ down this road,
Where it goes, nobody knows. (x2)

Verse 1:
One foot and then the other,
the footsteps one by one.
Five thousand miles to go
Before my walkin’s done.

Chorus:
I’m a-walkin’ down this road,
Where it goes, nobody knows. (x2)
I’m a-goin’ to the East,
Always famine, never feast. (x2)

Bridge:
cigarettes and tin cans in the ditch beside the road
old men fishing in the shade
choking on exhaust from trucks that rumble by
turning to the east… following my feet—

(Instrumental Solos)

Bridge:
cigarettes and tin cans in the ditch beside the road
old men fishing in the shade
choking on exhaust from trucks that rumble by
turning to the east… following my feet—

Final chorus:
Sit beneath the bodhi tree,
chewin’ on these leaves of tea. (x2)
Never sleep and always pray,
Swear we’ll all break out one day. (x2)
I’m a-walkin’ down this road,
Where it goes, nobody knows. (x2)

I wrote this song while I was with Dabang Band, but while we ran through it a few times, it never ended up being part of our repertory. I’d still like to turn it into something, but I would need a couple of days with some music software, and a couple of baritone-voiced singers, and some recording gear. Doable, but it’d take time. We’ll see if I ever get to it. If I find the sheet music around, I’ll post a scan of it here…