Tuesday, July 20, 2010

A Missed Opportunity

I've been listening to one of my more obscure LPs lately while wrestling with a piece I'm working on. It's the album "Cacophany" by the British punk ensemble Rudimentary Peni. The album is composed entirely of songs inspired by Edgar Allan Poe and Howard Philips Lovecraft. It's a bit of an acquired taste but I've had it on vinyl since my college days.

One song on the album, "Imps of the Perverse," features a particularly humorous rant against Grandpa Theobald. I enjoyed it for years before I learned that the rant did not originate with the band, but with Avrim Davidson, the executive editor of Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine, who wrote it as a review of The Survivor and Others in 1963. It was intended in good fun.

I recently discovered that some wag put together a video featuring the song and placed it up on Youtube. The staccato appearance of the song's captioning just cracks me up. I'm not sure if Lovecraft would have approved, but I'm pretty sure Two-Gun would have cracked a smile.

1 comment:

brink. said...

well, that's simply delightful. i confess that i didn't like things quite so, dare i say, cacophonous in my youth. but i think i've gotten more open-minded in my old age. thanks for sharing, now i'll go try to find some more rudimentary peni to listen to.