I was listening to the Threepenny Opera on my way somewhere last week--I'm discovering it for the first time, after not liking it much when I was younger--and thinking, "Wow, this is like canned Kipling concentrate. And it's a rather good parody of verses like 'Loot'. I wonder how much is straight parody and how much is sincere homage."

I grew up on The Threepenny Opera, but it took me until a few years ago (mostly because my exposure to Kipling was more limited than my exposure to Brecht and Weill) to notice how much Brecht evidently imprinted on Kipling. I mean, there's a pice from Happy End (1929) called the "Mandalay-Song." I have got to get hold of that.

BTW, if you haven't read "Loot" you're not missing much. It's about beating the crap out of races other than one's own, and taking all their stuff, except that it doesn't have the sense of irony that "Soldiers' Song" does.

I have read "Loot." Quite recently, fleurdelis28 and I were attempting to determine if it was written around a folksong, because otherwise nothing on earth explains its chorus. We checked Peter Bellamy, but he had written his own setting for the poem, which suggests that Kipling may just have pulled the whole thing out of his ear.

There will be more posts!