Under The Influence

As you may have gathered by now, I’m a serious kind of guy who, when not listening to Wagner’s “Ring Cycle,” slaps a few nicotine patches, lights a cigarette and proceeds to listen to late Radiohead while lying motionless in my sofa. Even when I catch Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” on the radio, instead of treating it as a mindless catchy tune, I start thinking of the politically-charged aesthetics of lesbian chic and proceed to start writing a long e-mail to cultural critic and feminist dissident Camille Paglia hoping to click on the “send” button one day.

But even “Why so serious?” me lets down my guard once in a while to find myself face to face with hilarious music ”“ not to be confused with frivolous music. Much cheap thrills were gained by me on following Weird Al’ Yankovic’s parodies of songs not only that I loved to hate ”“ “Eat It,” a gobbled-up version of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” and “Another One Rides the Bus,” a detour of Queen’s “Another One Bits the Dust” being two examples – but also of numbers that I love to love, such as the de-Teen Spirited “Smells Like Nirvana.” 

For the more ”˜sophisticated’ univ crowd, matters gravitated towards verbal play bands. There was Phish with songs like “Guela Papyrus” with its ”˜huh?’-inspiring lyrics, “So maybe I could be a fly/ And feed arachnid as I die/ And view the ritual from within/ The silken tunnel that they spin.” And there was the master of radical ha-ha, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention whose “Jewish Princess” formed my tastebuds of desire when he sang “I want a nasty little Jewish princess/ With long phony nails and a hairdo that rinses/ A horny little Jewish princess/ With a garlic aroma that could level tacoma/ Lonely inside/ Well, she can swallow my pride.” Palestine statehood may still be elusive, but I continue to roll on the ground when I hear Zappa. The diabolically funny Les Claypool of Primus also made me spill my drink from my mouth with his stuttering porcine classic “My Name is Mud.”

But even as these musicians were laugh-out-loud great, much of the music that really makes me break into fake cocaine snorts of hilarity are the ones that play it dead seriously. Parody heavy metal band Spinal Tap is hilarious. I still find my ribs breaking with unlimited guffaws when I hear genuine hair bands such as Cinderella and Pantera and some contemporary bands ”˜inspired’ by these lycra-clas legends. The look-how-many-notes-I-can-stash-into-a-bar guitarplay cracks me up.

But if you truly, deeply want to die with music-induced laughter, let me point you to a gem like no other: Rock Swings, an anthology of cover songs by Paul Anka. Now, why on earth would I thrust a 60s pin-up of aunties who brrrs out “Diana,” “Lonely Boy” and, er, “(You’re) Having My Baby?” Because the 2005 Rock Swings is an even more cracked-up album than Anka’s 1997 album, In A Metal Mood: No More Mr Nice Guy.

 

If In A Metal Mood, Anka make us ”˜discover’ the loungey-martini core to bad-ass numbers like G&R’s “Paradise City,” Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” and Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train,” Rock Swings leaves us damaged forever. Oasis probably disbanded expecting that Anka would one day record this version of “Wonderwall,” and Soundgarden must have regrouped to recover their reputation after listening to Anka’s stupendously glottal “Black Hole Sun.”

But the cover that should end all other competing forms of ”˜comic rock’ is Anka’s swinging rendition of a song in which the chorus, after a full flourish of Shirley Bassey-friendly horns goes, “Here we are now/ enter-taihn us.” You’ll slit your wrists laughing.

 Indi Hazra is a novelist and journalist. He lives in New Delhi. He does not get jazz. 

This column appeared in the July 2013 edition of Rolling Stone India