Since the Puritans got a shock when they landed on Plymouth Rock

[sovay]

The best piece of random information I've heard so far this week, from a musicologist I met over dinner as he was putting together a paper on the permutation of lyrics in Cole Porter's "Anything Goes" and "You're the Top" (from Anything Goes): that he has collected 89 versions of the latter, and one of them is a bawdy parody by Irving Berlin:

You're the burning heat
Of a bridal suite in use;
You're the breasts of Venus,
You're King Kong's penis,
You're self-abuse!

Perversely, this has made me feel much better about Irving Berlin.

Comments

[clarionj.livejournal.com]

"... putting together a paper on the permutation of lyrics..."

I'd love to do that; that's the kind of things we should be spending our days doing. What fun. (Now I have to convince my family that they don't need my extra income for things like jeans and shoes and oil filters and fish food and ... ack, I can't even convince myself. But, maybe I can convince my daughter college is worth it, that it offers the opportunity to write papers like this!)

How did he go about finding some of these things? I can't imagine where the above would have appeared!

[sovay]

How did he go about finding some of these things? I can't imagine where the above would have appeared!

I think he found it in an otherwise unexciting biography of either Irving Berlin or Cole Porter: for all the obvious reasons, he explained, no one's ever recorded this version. We decided that someone really needs to. That someone, however, will not be us.