Thursday 22 February 2018

Gruntuation

"Lawyers, Guns, and Money," by Warren Zevon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP5Xv7QqXiM

I like it when songs abandon love, their most common subject, for stories. Love is wondrous, of course, but sometimes you can get too much of a good thing.

This song tells a hilarious, cynical, very short story (it clocks in at under four minutes), with a really unreliable narrator -- he ain't nothing if not obvious. I think an aesthete might call it using broad, mordant brushstrokes. The broadness includes the raucous players, who sound like they're having the time of their lives. They're all pounding at their instruments with great wit and panache, and Mr. Zevon (goddam, I miss that unlucky bastard), does what he so often did so wonderfully while he was still here -- talk really clearly to us while also grunting and yelling and exclaiming with near-monosyllabic verve:  Hyeah! . . . Alright! . . . Huh! . . . Yes! . . . Unh! . . . Oow! . . . Yeh! . . . Yeh! . . . Yeh!
. . . Unh! . . . Alright!