Holy cow - I suddenly love YouTube…
Kasia July 17th, 2008
My favorite Tom Lehrer song ever, National Brotherhood Week.
Another favorite, the World War III song…
Lobachevsky (especially fun if you’ve done graduate work)…
…I honestly can’t think offhand of a Lehrer song that I dislike. Some are better than others, as one would rather expect, and some have held up better over the last 40-45 years than others. But on the whole, really he’s a brilliant satirist. Brilliant guy all around, actually; I think he graduated from Harvard at about 17.
Enjoy!
The Vatican Rag gets close to the border of bad taste.
It does. I can’t deny that.
My only two comments on the Vatican Rag:
1) I was a largely unchurched agnostic when I first heard it. Needless to say, I laughed a lot. Since becoming Catholic, I haven’t re-listened to it; but it’s popped into my head several times.
2) In the recording I own of the Vatican Rag, Lehrer prefaces his performance of it by mentioning the Church’s efforts to be more “secular” and saying that “if they want to ’sell the product’, perhaps they should rewrite some of the liturgical music to fit contemporary styles.”
I take that more as a jab against Vatican II than the Church per se, though I will admit one could take it the other way as well.
What’s more, I find it interesting that what Lehrer facetiously suggested by way fo a satirical song, in some ways has actually taken place (see earlier post about Take Five and Sing of the Lord’s Goodness). So perhaps Lehrer was simply prescient.
In any event, I think he’s on to something in mocking some Christian efforts to make the Faith “relevant” by downplaying or eliminating its countercultural and more challenging elements and trying to make it “hip”. But yes, he does come far closer to the always-fuzzy line dividing sharp satire from bad taste.