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

[sovay]

the author believes that Irving Berlin didn't write it.

. . . I really hope Irving Berlin did. I have so many fewer strange reasons to respect him than Cole Porter.

the archaic references in the original song.

That's where this student's paper started: the lyrics have been updated or otherwise altered in just about every performance since the original. And there's not even an original cast recording.

[fleurdelis28.livejournal.com]

I'd like to see a list, were such a thing possible, of your strange reasons for respecting people.

[sovay]

Random acts of weirdness have a lot to do with it: and if the above isn't weird and (at least for my expectations of Irving Berlin) random, I don't know what is.

[fleurdelis28.livejournal.com]

It should be a meme, actually -- "Leave a request and I'll tell you my strange reasons for respecting you."

[sovay]

. . . I would totally answer that meme.