Set Your Words To Music!

Hasil Adkins wrote a few of these, but that's only of interest to the Bucketful of Brains crowd. (Bobbi Blake's greatest is "City Hospital Patients" BTW!)
The ones I've heard fall into two categories - people who believe they're genuine poets ("We're zombies of society and I'm escaping in a mushroom"), and the hack manques who write what they imagine to be is assembly-line pop but missing the mark enough to reveal their hitherto-repressed idiosyncracies. ("I said 8, you showed up at 9, I'm gonna put you down like a dog if you don't set your date [sic] on time"), or an anti-pornography song called "Power of the Imagination". I wrote a two-page article on this for a magazine, which probably contains all the facts and names that I can't remember now being stoned at work as usual, but I do know that there is nothing like this stuff on Earth! (Better than the Willis/Johnston musique brut, because these are people genuinely TRYING to write something commercial and failing, due to inability rather than mental illness.)

What are some good compilations of this stuff? I remember one with a Dan Clowes cover a few years ago.

i've no idea what a song poem is but divine comedy's 'lucy' is composed entirely of bits lifted from wordsworth.

the new figurine, so romantic, so pretty in pink.

First, I must confess I haven't read the URL you suggested - the server wouldn't let me in. But one or two initial reactions to the notion of song-poem:

Some years ago now I attended an evening of Momus reciting his own lyrics, to promote the Lusts of a Moron lyric book. It was highly thought-provoking, but the sense of nakedness without the 'music' was seriously disconcerting.

When is a poem a lyric? When is a lyric a poem? The title track of Linton Kwesi Johnson's Bass Culture is astonishingly vital, but his lyrics/poems sometimes don't stand up to much careful scrutiny. But do they have to have value on the written page? LKJ's words are very closely linked to the sounds on the recordings. On the other side of that coin, Allen Ginsberg's poems have intrinsic rhythm.

Talking of whom, there's a Hungarian band called The Hobo Blues Band, who set loads of Ginsberg poems, translated into Hungarian of course, to music. Ginsberg was so impressed that he joined them on one record.

Meanwhile, I shall try again to connect to aspma.

Just seen the song poem website. Aha! Now i know what you were on about. Sorry for the above misunderstanding.

But gosh, what a treasure trove aspma is. Thanks!

the one with the Clowes cover is called "The Beat Of The Traps", it's a flamin wonder! 1st of several volumes, I don't know the other ones but I bet they're good too.

Daniel, what you had to contribute isn't impertinent; "song-poems" is a fairly loose term, anyway--and those are interesting parallel examples. But Dave Q, I regrettably must correct you--that's not the legendary Bobbi Blake, but Teri Summers And The Librettos doing "City's Hospital Patients." Agreed that it's a phenomenal song, worthy of Motown.

Now, as to my recommendations: All the Carnage Press collections are excellent, but most people would probably find the first, "The Makers Of Smooth Music (MSR Madness Vol. 2)," the best introduction; it had an earlier incarnation on vinyl titled "The Beat Of The Traps." (The CD cover is by Wayno.) My personal favorite is probably the second volume in the series, "The Human Breakdown Of Absurdity," if only because it contains even more Bobbi Blake and "City's Hospital Patients" and the title song. The third in the series, "I'm Just The Other Woman" is even weirder than the others, and now that I look at the song list, maybe the true best of the lot, with songs like "Betsy And Her Goat" and "Facts About Crack" and my own personal anthem, "Tipsy Topsy Turvey." So I guess you just have to have them all!

For those who like perhaps more consistency and less variety, go for the Rodd Keith anthology, "I Died Today." I'm really hoping Carnage will be releasing more collections, because for all my record-store excavation, I don't think I've ever actually seen an original song- poem record.

To quote Thomas Guygax's "At The Time:" "Along by our knowledge of the well-kept adage by the more of all help in with the all of coulds." Yeah!

Well I'm currently trying to, roughly, do that very thing.