BSPH: The Deviants - I'm Coming Home

"I'm Coming Home" is the song by seminal british psychedelic garage rock band The Deviants. It was written by Mick Farren and released on the band's 1968 album titled "Ptooff!".

The song is built around an increasingly menacing, baleful and ominous lyrics that fantasise on the topic of homecoming and rejoining with the loved one. It is an interesting take on a "lovelorn longing / coming back home" cliche that sprawls all over rock music (even "Louie Louie" is about that). In a way it exposes that cliche as being a good blanket to cover hapless glorification of an unhealthy obsessive behaviour in sweet flowery speech figures.

"I'm Coming Home" tells a story of a protagonist proclaiming that he is getting back "home", probably as a pep talk to himself. The description of his path is very meticulous and rich with details - he describes his journey step by step, gradually building tension and increasing the notion of impending threat.

He spells out how exactly he is going to get "home" and what he is going to do "there". The ultimate intent of the protagonist is to rejoin with his "lady", who, judging, from his words is not expecting this visit and probably even not suspecting it is going to happen at all. What he going to do is quite obvious - attempt a forceful but passionate swive, jump and knob to know.

From the musical standpoint, the song is basic four note stomping vamp waltz that ebbs and flows as the story goes, a kind of stretched out and meaner sibling of The Troggs' songs.

"I'm coming home" starts with the persistent tenacious march with a waltzy sweep at the end of the bar. It is plucky and cheerful. Gradually the march devolves into a sluggish chug, the beat intensifies and turns the whole thing into a manic rave-up Yardbirds-style.

The tension reaches to the point of combustion and the song explodes with fuzz-infested burst of two guitar soloing at the same time. They cancel each other out and make a lot of directionless noise.
The double solo transitions into the next section of the song where music calms down and takes a backseat so that Mick Farren could chillingly recite what he is going to do with the object of desire.

Then the song explodes with the sweeping solo that reiterate what was just said. It falls apart into a mindless shredding over a drum avalanche. And then things get back to an opening march, except now it is sloppier and it almost instantly devolves into a haphazard outbreak that falls off the cliff into outer space and dies out.

What makes the song particularly disturbing is that the whole song is a first-person fantasy scenario playing out in the protagonist's head - a disturbing narrative of the sickened mind trying to express itself. That's why a level of detail is so high.
And it goes a distance to prove its point. Mick Farren sings it with such a conviction you just can't help but get repulsed by his performance. He hams it up quite a bit but keeps things at reasonable level - his performance retains the plausibility of the scenario.

Overall, the song is a great example how to spin a familiar narrative into something more sinister and unfortunately relatable.

(As a sidenote, I'm Coming Home and We Will Fall sound really good back-to-back, i had a chance to listen to it that way once when i hit shuffle on my Winamp player.)

Sam Kinison - Homosexual Necrophilia

Spinning a stupid, obnoxious and annoying things is a lost art. It is one thing to write sonnets and paint landscapes - making a cohesive, comprehensible narrative out of one-note dead end braindead silly joke is an accomplishment worth including on your CV.

Sam Kinison was a master of doing such things. He could come up with a joke about dust particles in the air and turn it into an apocalyptic mayhem, a god's ultimate judgement Antonin Artaud style.

Just check out this routine.

In it Sam Kinison takes a stupid dead end premise and goes full-on "let me work it". He talks casual homophobia, institutional corruption, fear of death, life after death and other things while remaining in the pink part of outrage spectrum just to irritate everybody with the fact that he doesn't really go overboard.

There are so many ways you can botch this time of the joke and he manages to make it just right.




He starts by setting up the premise - a recount of how he read a story about homosexual perverts doing necrophiliac stuff. The story goes - homosexual necrophiliacs go to the morgues and mortuaries and pay money to managers in order to quality spend time with fresh corpses. Important to note - he recounts not the story itself, just how he read it and how initially reacted to it. This approach gives him a considerable distance from the subject matter. He can't take a hit for making this joke because he just shares his experiences. Neat.

After establishing the narrative - he bounces off the predictable audience reaction and takes off any responsibility for the outrageousness of the story by insisting that he only read about it in the paper and that in this case he is in the same position as the audience.

Then, instead of elaborating on the story, he starts to mock around the premise. At first he states his position on the subject matter in an extremely exaggerated matter. Then he starts to tear the thing apart as outrageous and obnoxious.

The joke culminates with Kinison reenacting the way this whole thing might have happened.

He lays down on the floor face down and pretends to be a corpse. He imitates its internal monologue and then switches the role to homosexual necrophiliac doing his dirty business while keeping the corpses internal monologue intact right when he starts to freak out because of the penetration. And it ends there.

As a result, you have a sentence spinned out into a routine.

The Chimney Sweep and The Miller (1902)

Early cinema was functioning similarly to early YouTube or modern TikTok. It was mostly some short skits that were adapted from various vaudeville routines with a hacksaw and fish hook.
As time went by, it was regurgitated over and over again until the lineage was blurred enough to be forgotten so that the neverending loop of regurgitated tropes seemed fresh.

Nevertheless, the documentation of vaudeville routine from early XX century is pure bliss.

This particular bit is one of my faves. 

It is a story of a somewhat unfortunate but nevertheless hilarious encounter between two professionals - The Chimney Sweep and The Miller. Both of whom are dedicated workers who just want to do their own thing and not messed with.

The narrative of the routine is the most basic "versus" scenario based on slapstick misunderstanding that escalated into the uppermost absurdity.

Two sides have their own designated colours - The Chimney Sweep is covered in black sooth, The Miller wears white uniform.

The story goes - both guys are going somewhere, minding their own business. Up until this point the day was just like it was the day before and the day after.

Because of deep occupation by the fleeting thoughts - they don't notice each other moving on the collision course. Eventually, this causes them to stumble into each other and as a result brutally break their concentration.

None of them considers this encounter to be by any means pleasant. The chimney sweep's sooth dirties the millers uniform and its source of great frustration for him. At the same time, the sweep's clothes are covered

So the whole thing instantly goes off the rails and rapidly escalates into a fight. At first they mouth words and name names at each other. Then, for a moment or so, they consider to tackle each other, but soon enough (a matter of Planck time unit or so) they realise that hitting each other with their bags is a much better option in terms of functional efficiency and physical impact.

So they hit each other with their bags. The hits are coming in bursts. It takes a bit of an effort to pick up the bag high enough and direct the hit towards the opponent's upper body. Black soot spots white clothes, white flour covers the sweeps black clothing. They give their all with each hit and soon the action starts to slow down because of exhaustion.

The skirmish creates a black and white cloud in which both of them disappear leaving audience to gaze at the bi-colour cloud of soot and flour. Probably until it dissipates leaving empty stage.

Nothing spectacular, but it works on a visceral level. 

Also - take a look at the backdrop - that lake and forest look somewhat uncanny. I wonder what that might mean.

***
Now, with the vaudeville tradition gone far and away - there is a lot more of detachment that makes viewing of such shorts a very different kind of experience, especially for the uninitiated.

You kinda grasp the basic idea, but still lacking much of the cultural context. So instead of laughing at the juxtaposition of social classes, their manners and worldviews, modern viewer laughs at the action itself. 

WCW The Red Wheelbarrow but not really

Some time ago Amanda Earl had posted that WCW poem and said that everyone likes to riff off it. That’s true. So i thought it would be a good idea to make my own version. 

But i didn’t wanted to leave it intact. And so i chopped and screwed the thing and made something completely different.

There is no wheelbarrow. And chicken is a verb. Yey…